Patent ID: 6885764

Claim:
A method to be used with a set of CT helical data corresponding to a thick slice of interest (TSOI), the method for generating a thick slice data weighting function w(β) by combining slice specific Z-smoothing scalars zw and helical slice image weight functions hw corresponding to first through N slice images to be combined to generate the thick slice image corresponding to the TSOI, the method comprising the steps of: (a) for the first slice, mathematically combining the helical weight function hw and an image specific scalar zw(n) to generate a scaled weighting function w n (β) corresponding to the first slice; (b) storing scaled weighting function w n (β) weights at the beginning of an intermediate weighting array w iti (β); (c) for the next adjacent slice, mathematically combining the helical weighting function hw and an image specific scalar zw(n) to generate a scaled weighting function w n (β); (d) identifying an overlapping segment of the scaled weighting function w n (β) that overlaps an overlapped segment of the intermediate weighting array w iti (β) and adding the overlapping segment weights to the overlapped segment weights; (e) storing the function w n (β) segment weights that do not overlap the intermediate weighting function array at the end of the intermediate weighting function array; (f) repeating steps (c) through (e) for each of the slice images to be combined to generate the thick image; and (g) outputting the intermediate weighting function array as a final weighting array w ti (β).