Patent ID: 6855114

Claim:
A method of detecting a candidate abnormality in a sonographic medical image, comprising the steps of: obtaining a sonographic medical image; determining a radial gradient index (RGI) at plural pixels to produce an RGI image; thresholding the RGI image; determining a candidate abnormality in the RGI image based on the thresholding step; locating a center point of the candidate abnormality in the RGI image and a corresponding center point in the sonographic image; and segmenting the candidate abnormality in the sonographic image to identify a margin of the candidate abnormality, said segmenting including identifying a plurality of potential candidate margins based on the center point in the sonogranhic image, determining an average radial derivative for each of the plurality of potential candidate margins, and selecting the margin of the candidate abnormality from the plurality of potential candidate margins based on the determined average radial derivative.