Patent ID: 7035450

Claim:
A method for locating an element of interest contained in a three-dimensional object comprising: providing a set of images having at least first and second digitized stereotaxic images having positions of homologous regions of interest corresponding to the element of interest and appearing in the set of stereotaxic images; selecting in a first stereotaxic image a first target region of interest having a target pixel; matching the first target region of interest with a second region of interest homologous to the first target region of interest and appearing in the second stereotaxic image; generating a target window of chosen dimensional characteristics and containing the selected first target region of interest around pixels of the selected target pixel; selecting a set of pixels in the second stereotaxic image according to a predetermined selection criterion so as to generate a second window around each selected pixel, the second window having the same dimensional characteristics as the generated target window; processing a correlation between gray-scale levels of the pixels in each second window and the tray scale levels of the pixels in the target window to obtain a correlation for each second window; and using the correlation values to identify the region of interest homologous to the target region of interest and thereby minimize the risk of matching error between the homologous regions of interest.