Patent ID: 8831308

Claim:
A method for segmenting intracranial aneurysms in digital medical images comprising the steps of: extracting a mesh representing a vessel surface from a volumetric digital image, said mesh comprising a set of points {p i } and edges {e ij } connecting respective points; and finding a set of binary labelings that minimizes an energy functional of the labelings and of shape descriptors of each point in the mesh, wherein the binary labelings segments an aneurysm from the surface by associating one of two labels with each point p i , wherein a label indicates whether an associated point is on a vessel or on an aneurysm, wherein the energy functional includes a unary potential term summed over all points that represent a posterior distribution of the labels over the points, and a pairwise potential term summed over all edges that represents neighborhood labeling relationships, wherein the unary potential term comprises a weak unary prior and a strong unary prior, wherein said weak unary prior is learned from an vessel surface dataset of pathological vessels and an associated expert labeled groundtruth based on extracting shape descriptors from the pathological vessel surface dataset.