Patent ID: 8837800

Claim:
A method for identifying arterial input function (AIF) and/or venous-output function (VOF) voxels in perfusion imaging of a brain, the method comprising: a) acquiring one or more CT or MR perfusion images; b) automatically selecting some or all of the voxels of the perfusion images for AIF/VOF processing; c) for each selected voxel, automatically fitting a Gaussian to its signal(time), where the parameters of the Gaussian are amplitude A, width σ, and time offset t o ; d) automatically normalizing each of the parameters separately to zero mean and unity standard deviation to provide normalized amplitude A′, normalized width σ′ and normalized time offset t o ′; e) automatically excluding all voxels having A′<0, σ′>0, and t o ′>0, to provide a voxel subset; f) automatically computing a score S=A′·(−t o ′)·(−σ′) for each voxel in the voxel subset; g) automatically identifying the AIF/VOF voxels as being N voxels in the voxel subset having the highest scores, where N is a predetermined integer that depends on spatial resolution of the one or more CT or MR perfusion images.