Patent ID: 7965815

Claim:
A device for processing and presenting x-ray images, comprising: an x-ray acquisition unit that emits x-rays in an x-ray acquisition cone; an optical acquisition unit that emits light in an optical acquisition cone; said x-ray acquisition unit and said optical acquisition unit being oriented so that said x-ray acquisition cone and said optical acquisition cone are congruent; a trigger unit that activates said x-ray acquisition unit and said optical acquisition unit to simultaneously respectively acquire an x-ray image of an examination subject in said x-ray acquisition cone and an optical exposure of the same examination subject in said optical acquisition cone, said x-ray image and said optical exposure being congruent due to said x-ray acquisition and said optical acquisition cone being congruent; a subject extraction unit supplied with said optical exposure configured to perform an extraction procedure that identifies and extracts only a line representing an edge of the subject in said optical exposure by image segmentation, to produce an extracted edge line; and a computerized combination unit configured to additively combine said x-ray image and said extracted edge line with said edge line superimposed on an edge in said x-ray image corresponding to said edge in said optical exposure due to the congruency of the x-ray image and the optical exposure, to produce a combined image as an output thereof with said extracted edge line inserted into said x-ray image.