Patent ID: 7480412

Claim:
A method of characterizing an image, the method comprising: tobogganing one or more selected toboggan potentials to generate one or more toboggan parameters, wherein at least one of the selected toboggan potentials is selected from the image, or one or more portions of the image; forming one or more toboggan clusters using at least one of the toboggan parameters; and selecting one or more of the toboggan clusters to compute one or more feature parameters, wherein said feature parameters include a slide direction, a direct distance and a sliding distance from a voxel to its concentration location, and a distance ratio from the direct distance and sliding distance, wherein said distance ratio is a measure of a sphericity of a cluster, wherein computing feature parameters includes calculating a surface isotropy measure as a ratio of a local concentration of a location (“LCL”) and a minimum distance to a surface of a cluster for a selected toboggan cluster, wherein the LCL value identifies a number of voxels that slide to a location, and the minimum distance is a shortest distance from the location of the LCL to the surface of the toboggan cluster.