Patent ID: 8682418

Claim:
A diagnosis supporting apparatus comprising: an image input section configured to input an endoscopic image acquired from a living mucosal tissue; a structure detection section configured to detect a plurality of similar circular-shaped structures from an image signal corresponding to the endoscopic image inputted to the image input section; a structure connecting section configured to connect the similar circular-shaped structures to each other by adding regions having diagonal lines that correspond to the distances between the center points, wherein the structure connecting section connects the plurality of similar circular-shaped structures detected by the structure detection section when distances between center points of the respective similar circular-shaped structures are equal to or smaller than a predetermined distance; an overlapping integration section configured to integrate each of the regions overlapping each other into an aggregation; a threshold processing section configured to determine among aggregations integrated by the overlapping integration section each of the aggregations that is equal to or larger than a predetermined threshold; and a network shape generation section configured to generate a predetermined network shape from each of the aggregations that the threshold processing section has determined is equal to or larger than the predetermined threshold.