Patent ID: 8249318
Filing Date: 2012-08-21
Classification: G06K

Abstract:
1. A method for identifying implanted reconstructive prosthetic devices comprising: (a) obtaining a digital radiographic image of a prosthetic implant that has been implanted in a person or animal for which the manufacturer and/or model is unknown; (b) allowing a user to enter into a computer metadata relating to identification of the unknown implant for use as metadata feature values; (c) cleaning up the unknown implant image by removing extraneous image content not relevant to identification of the unknown implant, converting the unknown implant image to monochrome, thresholding it, and/or smoothing out any rough edges; (d) providing a database of images of implants for which the manufacturer and/or model is known, wherein each of the known images has a format; (e) rotating, flipping and/or scaling the unknown implant image to a normalized format that matches the format of the images in the database of known implants; (f) extracting features from the unknown implant image according to one or more feature extraction algorithms to generate extracted feature values, wherein the unknown implant image has a shape, the extracted feature values describe the shape of the unknown implant image, the metadata feature values and the extracted feature values for the unknown implant image are expressed as a feature vector, and the known images stored in the database also have feature vectors; (g) comparing the feature vector for the unknown implant image to the feature vectors of the known images stored in the database according to a comparison algorithm to create an overall likelihood score for each of the known implant images; and (h) wherein step (g) generates results, displaying the results to a user, wherein the results that are displayed to the user include feature match strength descriptors that reflect likelihood of a match between a feature of the unknown implant image and a feature of one of the known implant images in the database.