Patent ID: 8335552

Claim:
A method of determining a delivery location within a volume, comprising: selecting a physical region within the volume for a drug delivery; determining a volume of efficacy for the drug within the physical region where the delivered drug achieves a tissue concentration to elicit a meaningful physiological effect in the selected physical region; acquiring image data of the volume; determining an image region of therapy in the image data that is the physical region within the image data; and determining an optimized delivery point within the selected physical region to achieve the volume of efficacy wherein determining an optimized delivery point includes operating a processor to execute instructions for: identifying a plurality of points within the image region of therapy and a plurality of line segments radially extending from each point of the plurality of points, measuring a length of each line segment of the plurality of line segments from each point, assigning a weight to each line segment based at least on a location of a second end of each line segment relative to at least one of a border of the image region of therapy or a structure in the image data, determining a weighted average length of the plurality of line segments extending from each point, and outputting the optimized delivery point based on the determined weighted average of the line segments extending from each point.