Patent ID: 8407267

Claim:
An apparatus for storing an image data set comprising image data generated by a computed tomography scan of a slice of a body of a patient with respect to a body axis, said apparatus comprising: a memory device in which reference slice description data are stored that represent a reference body other than the patient and that are organized in said memory according to reference body coordinates representing respective locations in said reference body along said body axis; a processing platform configured to assign slice description data to the image data set according to a predetermined feature extraction technique, and to execute a comparison between the slice description data and the reference slice description data to identify highest correlating reference slice description data in said memory device, that have a highest statistical correlation to the slice description data assigned to said image data set, and to attach a reference body coordinate value to the image data set corresponding to a location along the body axis of the highest correlating reference slice description data; a storage device in which the image data set and the attached reference body coordinate value are stored; and said processing platform being configured to receive a query for said image data set in the form of slice description data and to convert the slice description data of the query into a reference body coordinate, and being configured to retrieve the image data set from the storage device by finding the reference body coordinate value attached to the image data set said storage device that corresponds to the reference body coordinate into which the query was converted.