Patent ID: 8908945

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of segmenting a digital image of biological tissue, the computer including a processor and a memory operatively coupled to the processor, the method comprising acts of: accessing, in the memory, a ranking model calculated from training data representing shapes of conforming biological unit exemplars and shapes of non-conforming biological unit exemplars, the ranking model defining a ranking of a quality of the shapes in the training data with respect to the conforming biological unit exemplars and the non-conforming biological unit exemplars; accessing, in the memory, image data representing the digital image of biological tissue; identifying, by the processor, a first shape and a set of second constituent shapes in the digital image using the image data, wherein the first shape comprises a union of the set of second constituent shapes; determining, by the processor, a rank of a first data point in the image data corresponding to the first shape and a rank of a second data point in the image data corresponding to the set of second constituent shapes using the ranking model; and segmenting, by the processor, the digital image using one of the first shape and the set of second constituent shapes based on which of the first data point and the second data point has a greater respective rank.