Patent ID: 7447342

Claim:
A method of identifying a polyp in a digital image of a colon, wherein said image comprises a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of voxels in a 3-dimensional space, said method comprising the steps of: providing the image with a set of 3 mutually orthogonal axes; centering, for each voxel in the image, a cutting plane about a central voxel at a first orientation with respect to the axes of the image; determining an intersection of the cutting plane with the colon, and examining a trace of the image within said intersection; and selecting, where the trace is small and round, those voxels in the intersection for further analysis, wherein said steps of centering, determining, and selecting are repeated for a plurality of cutting planes, each at a different orientation with respect to the image axes, wherein said plurality of cutting places are uniformly distributed on an orientation sphere, and wherein said cutting planes are picked so that each plane has a normal with coordinates (A,B,C), where A, B, and C are integers between −1 and 1, and wherein A, B, and C cannot all be zero.