Patent ID: 7466848

Claim:
A method for automatically detecting breast tumors and lesions in an image comprising: acquiring an image of a breast; filtering the image; applying texture and intensity classifiers to each pixel of the image, the classifiers corresponding to probabilities of the pixel belonging to a lesion or tumor; determining a seed point in the image by retrieving a set of points of interest in the image, selecting a first point from the set of points, calculating a joint probability that the first point corresponds to a tumor, calculating mean joint probabilities that points in a circular region around the first point correspond to a tumor, and designating a point within the circular region having a maximum mean joint probability as the seed point; growing a region of interest around the seed point; calculating directional gradients for each pixel in the image; determining boundary points of the region of interest using the directional gradients; and processing the boundary points with a deformable model to determine the presence or absence of a tumor or lesion in the image.