Patent ID: 8077946

Claim:
An apparatus for assisting report generation, the apparatus comprising: a first measuring unit to measure a size of an abnormal shadow present on one of a previous medical image and a current medical image obtained by imaging the same subject, the current image being obtained later than the previous medical image; a second measuring unit to measure a size of an abnormal shadow present on the other of the current medical image and the previous medical image, a position of the abnormal shadow on the other of the images corresponding to a position of the abnormal shadow on the one of the images; a report outputting unit to automatically generate a character string describing a change in the size of the abnormal shadow based on the results of measurement by the first measuring unit and the results of measurement by the second measuring unit and output a file of a report text about a case shown in the previous and current medical images, the report text containing the character string; a detailed positional aligning unit for positionally aligning the previous medical image and the current medical image; and an extracting unit for extracting abnormal shadows from within a region in a periphery of a set point; the first measuring unit employing the extracting unit to extract and measure sizes of abnormal shadows which are present in the periphery of the set point within the one of the previous medical image and the current medical image; and the second measuring unit determining the position of a set point within the other of the images corresponding to the set point in the one of the images based on positional alignment data obtained by the detailed positional aligning unit, and employing the extracting unit to extract and measure sizes of abnormal shadows which are present in the periphery of the corresponding set point within the other of the image.