Patent ID: 7736313

Claim:
A method for detecting a lesion in an input digital ultrasound image of anatomical tissue, the method being carried out by a digital computer including a computer readable storage medium storing a computer program of the method, the method comprising steps of: accessing the input digital ultrasound image of anatomical tissue; segmenting spatially contiguous pixels in the input digital ultrasound image into a plurality of regions in accordance with substantially similar intensity patterns, the segmenting step including substeps of: segmenting the input digital ultrasound image into regions by computing an intensity histogram, partitioning the histogram into a plurality of clusters that correspond to distinctive prominent intensities in the input digital ultrasound image, classifying each pixel of the input digital ultrasound image to the closest cluster as a function of the mean values of the intensity clusters; placing a neighborhood window at each pixel in order to determine what neighborhood pixels are used to compute a local intensity histogram for the pixel, wherein an initial neighborhood window size is set at the size of the entire input digital ultrasound image, recomputing local mean values of each intensity class based on the current segmentation, reclassifying the pixels according to the recomputed local mean values of intensity classes, repeating the recomputing and reclassifying substeps until a convergence is reached, and repeating the placing, recomputing, reclassifying and repeating substeps for one or more reduced neighborhood window sizes, until segmentation of the input digital ultrasound image is obtained when a minimum window size is processed; selecting, from the plurality of regions, one or more candidate lesion regions having an intensity value lower than a pre-determined intensity value; and classifying the one or more candidate lesion regions into at least one of the following classes: benign, malignant, or unknown.