Patent ID: 7539337

Claim:
A method of identifying components of an object defined as a plurality of volume elements (voxels) in volumetric multi-energy computed tomography (CT) data, each voxel being associated with a density value (D) and an atomic number value (Z), comprising: a. computing a distribution of object voxels by density and atomic number (DZ distribution); b. identifying clusters within the computed DZ distribution wherein identifying clusters within the computed DZ distribution comprises: i. using a modified version of the mean shift step method to find clusters of the DZ distribution, wherein using a modified version of the mean shift method includes the step of applying a function to the size of the mean shift step so that the magnitude of a large step is reduced, and the magnitude of a small step is increased, ii. computing cluster connectivity features; and iii. merging connected clusters; c. assigning a component label to each object voxel based on the DZ distribution clusters corresponding to the density and atomic number values associated with each voxel; and d. post-processing the set of voxels identified as belonging to each component.