Patent ID: 7260248

Claim:
A method of locating a portion of tissue with a characteristic of interest, the method comprising the steps of: (a) characterizing an acetowhitening signal from a temporal sequence of images of a tissue following application of a chemical agent to the tissue, wherein the chemical agent comprises acetic acid; (b) analyzing the acetowhitening signal to determine a measure of similarity between two selected regions of the tissue, the measure of similarity indicating how similarly tissue in each region responds to the chemical agent, and grouping the two selected regions if the measure of similarity is larger than a given threshold, wherein the step of determining the measure of similarity comprises, for each of the two selected regions, averaging data corresponding to pixels within the region at each of a plurality of time steps to obtain a mean signal for the region, then quantifying the similarity between the two resulting, mean signals; (c) repeating step (b), thereby differentiating regions according to how tissue in each region responds to the chemical agent; and (d) locating a portion of the tissue with a characteristic of interest, the located portion corresponding to at least one of the differentiated regions.