Patent ID: 7567696

Claim:
A method for detecting an aortic valve, comprising: (a) casting a plurality of rays from a seed point within a slice of a computed tomography (CT) dataset of an aorta; (b) computing a Gaussian model for voxels in the slice, wherein the Gaussian model produces a threshold; (c) growing a circle on the slice from a point within the aorta until control points of the circle reach the threshold; (d) computing a repulsion vector for each control point reaching the threshold; (e) repositioning the circle according to an average of the repulsion vectors until the circle is not within the aorta; (f) projecting a copy of the circle onto an adjacent slice of the CT dataset; (g) reducing the radius of the copy of the circle and taking at least one statistical measurement of the copy if the radius is below the threshold; repeating steps (c-g) on remaining slices of the CT dataset until the aortic valve is detected by using at least one of the statistical measurements; segmenting the aorta constrained by the location of the aortic valve; and displaying the segmented aorta.