Patent ID: 8019139

Claim:
A method of segmenting tissue of interest in a CT scan of the area of the tissue of interest, comprising: processing a first section of the CT scan data using a computer to define a contour representing a 2D boundary between the tissue of interest and adjacent tissue; processing a succession of further sections using the computer to define a contour representing a 2D boundary of the tissue of interest in the section being processed, each 2D boundary being within a selected distance from the 2D boundary in a previously processed section; and generating a 3D boundary enclosing the tissue of interest in relation to the adjacent tissue from the succession of 2D boundaries defined in the succession of sections, wherein the processing to define the 2D boundaries in the first section and the boundaries in the successive sections is performed by the computer using a cost function that defines the likelihood that a voxel in a section is not located on the boundary between the heart and the first adjacent tissue, the boundary in the section being processed being determined as a path between a pair of start and end points having the lowest cost, wherein a cost assigned to a given voxel is calculated by the computer as a difference of a bad-grade and a good-grade, the good-grade being indicative of the extent that the given voxel's arrangement of neighbors has attributes of a voxel at the boundary between the tissue of interest and adjacent tissues and the bad-grade being indicative of the extent that the given voxel's arrangement of neighbors has attributes different from attributes of a voxel at the boundary between adjacent tissues, and wherein the good-grade of given voxel is based upon any one or more of the following, for a predetermined n: (a) the number of adjacent tissue voxels neighboring the given voxel within an n-voxels neighborhood, divided by n; and (b) the number of fat voxels within an n-voxels neighborhood, from above times the total number of tissue of interest voxels or adjacent tissue voxels and contrast voxels within an n-voxels neighborhood, from below, divided by n (n+1).