Patent ID: 8126243

Claim:
An image processing method comprising: a voxel normalization step further comprising equalizing voxel sizes of a first 3D image created from a plurality of first tomographic images obtained from an arbitrary part of a subject and a second 3D image created from a plurality of second tomographic images obtained from said part by applying a pixel interpolation process to at least one of the first and the second 3D images, and assigning voxels each having a NULL code to regions other than an effective field of view of one of the first and the second 3D images which have a smaller effective field of view than the other, thereby creating a first normalized 3D image corresponding to the first 3D image and a second normalized 3D image corresponding to the second 3D image both having the same size of voxels and the same effective field of view; and a fused image creation step of creating a fused image, using the first normalized 3D image and the second normalized 3D image.