Patent ID: 7720271

Claim:
A computer-implemented reactive-diffusion method for estimating a diameter of an object of interest comprising: a computer to implement the steps of: providing a volume of interest comprising a plurality of voxels and including the object of interest; initializing at least two volumes of the volume of interest, wherein each of the plurality of voxels has at least two values corresponding to the at least two volumes of the volume of interest, respectively; performing, iteratively, a diffusion operation and a reaction operation on the plurality of voxels to adjust the at least two values; comparing, for each voxel, the at least two values to a plurality of thresholds to assign each voxel to one of the at least two volumes, wherein the assignment of the plurality of voxels is a segmentation result, wherein the object of interest is detected by comparing connected components determined at sequentially lower thresholds of the plurality of thresholds to determining the object of interest at one of the plurality of thresholds, the object of interest being a connected component having no overlaps to another component determined at a previous threshold; and estimating a diameter of the object of interest from the segmentation result, wherein the object of interest is represented by at least one of the at least two volumes but less than all the volumes.