Patent ID: 7747308

Claim:
A non-invasive method of evaluating actual and/or potential cardiac injury in a patient, comprising: electronically determining, for a plurality of regions of interest in a medical image of a heart, respective locations of voxels in three-dimensional space and an associated respective measure of intensity for each of the voxels; electronically identifying whether high intensity voxels from the determining step are clustered or distributed in the regions of interest; evaluating whether there is a likelihood the heart has a global injury using the measures of intensity and spatial coordinate data of the high intensity voxels based on data from the identifying step to determine whether the patient has a change in tissue composition and/or function that is in a substantially randomly distributed pattern and/or in a pattern that is not detectable at a resolution of image slices associated with the medical image; and providing output of the determined likelihood to a display associated with a clinician workstation.