Patent ID: 7668353

Claim:
A method for preparing an appraisal of tomographic colon pictures, in particular of CT or MR pictures of the colon, comprising: conducting a manual personal search during which detected lesions of the tomographic colon pictures are confirmed; conducting a search for detecting a set of lesions via a computer, with or without automatic preliminary confirmation, the computer aided preliminary confirmations being manually confirmed; and excluding lesions that have already been classified as known and confirmed, after a comparison with a set of the lesions already detected manually, from the set of lesions detected with computer assistance and that are to be presented again for personal confirmation, wherein at least the following method steps are carried out: determining and storing positions of the detected lesions during the manual preliminary confirmation; determining and storing, during the computer aided automatic preliminary confirmation, positions of the detected lesions in the set of the lesions potentially to be evaluated; calculating distances from the positions of the manually detected lesions in relation to all the positions of the lesions detected with computer assistance: and checking, thereafter, the set of the lesions potentially to be evaluated for the necessity of a reconfirmation, the checking including, making a branch, if all the distances of a lesion detected with computer assistance from the manually detected lesion are greater than a specific value, to checking the next lesion detected with computer assistance, making a branch, if it is impossible to determine the lesion base of the considered lesion detected with computer assistance, to checking the next lesion detected with computer assistance, making a branch, if the normal direction of the considered lesion detected with computer assistance points in a direction other than the normal direction of the manually detected lesion with the shortest distance from the considered lesion detected with computer assistance, to checking the next lesion detected with computer assistance, otherwise deleting the considered lesion, detected with computer assistance, from the set of the lesions detected with computer assistance that are to be evaluated, and presenting all the lesions, detected with computer assistance that remain in the set of the lesions detected with computer assistance that are to be evaluated, for manual reconfirmation.