Patent ID: 8326012
Filing Date: 2012-12-04
Classification: A61B,G06F,G06T,G16H

Abstract:
1. A computer-implemented method for processing and displaying breast x-ray tomosynthesis information, comprising: receiving a plurality of breast x-ray tomosynthesis cases, each case comprising at least one breast x-ray tomosynthesis data volume associated with at least one breast of a patient; for each of said cases, determining a target count N representing a target number of marked computer-aided detection (CAD) findings to be displayed to a user on a review workstation in conjunction the at least one data volume for that case, wherein said target count N is independent of any breast tissue image information contained in any of said data volumes for any of said cases; for each said case, receiving a set of candidate CAD findings associated with the at least one breast of the patient, each candidate CAD finding being associated with a potentially suspicious lesion in the at least one breast as identified by a CAD algorithm and characterizing the potentially suspicious lesion by a plurality of computed features including a certainty of finding metric; for each said case, designating up to said target count N of said candidate CAD findings as being marked CAD findings according to the steps of: for each of said cases, displaying said at least one data volume to the user on the review workstation with viewable annotation markers thereon corresponding to each of said marked CAD findings, said review workstation not displaying annotation markers corresponding to the candidate CAD findings that are not marked CAD findings; whereby the user experience provided by the review workstation in reviewing the plurality of cases is weighted more toward consistency in the number of marked CAD findings per case and less toward uniform evaluation of the candidate CAD findings across different cases.