Patent ID: 7576740

Claim:
A method for revealing a suspicious region in an organ of a body, which comprises: scanning a preselected region of body tissue that contains an organ of interest to obtain a volumetric database including voxels of the preselected region; saving the volumetric database in memory as a saved volumetric database; subjecting the saved volumetric database to a segmentation technique to identify and distinguish an outer surface of the organ from surrounding tissue; using the outer surface of the organ as a reference surface; selecting a distance from said outer reference surface of the organ; extracting from said saved database voxels that are within the organ and that are located at the selected distance from the identified outer reference surface; extracting from said saved database voxels that are within the organ and that are located at the selected distance from the identified outer reference surface; after determining the distance from said reference surface for each voxel outside said reference surface, reformatting said voxels by shifting each of said voxels in said reference surface by a distance along a respective parallel line into a common plane while shifting each voxel in each of the lines by the distance that the given voxel in the reference surface in the given line was shifted; mapping the extracted voxels onto a two-dimensional grid; and displaying said two-dimensional grid onto a two-dimensional display to reveal any suspicious region in the organ at the selected predetermined distance from the reference surface.