Patent ID: 7058210

Claim:
A method for characterizing tissue in medical images for use in disease diagnosis and detection comprising: computing an information object hierarchy of increasing complexity to characterize anatomical tissue, the object hierarchy containing models based on oharacleristios an image acquisition device and anatomical characteristics of at least one given disease, wherein the hierarchy comprises a low level corresponding to signal models reoresentative of the image acquisition device and a high level corresponding to anatomical models derived in accordance with expert observation and knowledoe of the at least one given disease; comparing information by performing Bayesian competition using Bayes Factors at respective levels of the object hierarchy to identify suspicious tissue indicative of disease, wherein the Bayes Factor is a ratio of posterior model probabilities given intensity and share data for two given models M=1 and M=2, and where x=intensity data, θ 1 =geometric model for M=1 and θ 2 =geometric model for M=2 and is expressed as: p ⁡ ( M = 1 | x , θ 1 , θ 2 ) p ⁡ ( M = 2 | x , θ 1 , θ 2 ) .