Patent ID: 7379576
Filing Date: 2008-05-27
Classification: A61B,G06T,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method of identifying a patient from digital medical images, said method comprising the steps of: providing a first digital image volume of an organ of a patient and a second digital image volume of the same organ from a patient, wherein each said image comprises a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points in a D -dimensional space; segmenting each slice of the first image volume and calculating a cross-sectional area of the organ in each slice to form a first area profile of the first image volume; segmenting each slice of the second image volume and calculating a cross-sectional area of the organ in each slice to form a second area profile of the second image volume; comparing the first area profile with the second area profile to determine a correlation value for the two profiles; determining, based on the correlation value between the first area profile and the second area profile, whether the first digital image volume of the organ and the second digital image volume of the same organ came from the same patient, wherein the determination of whether the first digital image volume of the organ and the second digital image volume of the same organ come from the same patient is based on the Bayesian classification rule where P(C|A i ) is the probability distribution function of correlation value C for class A i , P(A i ) is the a priori probability of class A, and where A 1 is the class of same-patient image pairs and A 2 is the class of different-patient image pairs.