Patent ID: 6320976
Filing Date: 2001-11-20
Classification: A61B,G06K,G06T

Abstract:
A computer assisted diagnosis system for automatically determining diagnostic saliency of regions in a digital image comprised of a plurality of pixels, the system comprising:a memory unit;a plurality of filters stored in said memory unit, each of the plurality of filters designed to identify a specific type of diagnostic finding;a virtual window for defining regions in the image at which each of the plurality of filters is applied;a set of training image patches corresponding to typical appearances of the specific type of diagnostic finding;a distance measure set corresponding to the training image patches and the regions in the image defined by the virtual window;a feature set corresponding to the distance measure set; anda processor for applying each of the plurality of filters to the image to compute distances between the regions in the image defined by the virtual window and the training image patches bases on the distance measure set and the feature set, and ranking regions in the image corresponding to a particular type of diagnostic finding based on the computed distances.