Patent ID: 7218767

Claim:
A method of improving the resolution of a medical nuclear image of a body volume by combining it with an ultrasound image of the same body volume, the method comprising for various assumed relative positions of the nuclear medical image and the ultrasound image each time an evaluation index concerning the correspondence of a nuclear sub-image and an ultrasound sub-image of the same region of the body volume is calculated, and the relative position having the optimum value of the evaluation index is selected as the spatial registration position of the nuclear sub-image and the ultrasound sub-image; wherein the evaluation index between an ultrasound sub-image and a nuclear sub-image is calculated as the sum over all corresponding image points, each summand being assigned at least one of a large positive value if the compared image points both represent a relevant structure; being assigned a small value if only the image point of the ultrasound sub-image represents a relevant structure; and being assigned a large negative value if only the image point of the nuclear sub-image represents a relevant structure.