Patent ID: 8457379

Claim:
A method for quantifying organ motion comprising: using a plurality of CT images of an organ which has undergone a subtle variation or deformation as input data; extracting, and subjecting to thinning, portions of the plurality of CT images showing blood vessels and trachea distributed inside the organ; using the thinned images to extract coordinates of bifurcations and connections; deleting neighboring bifurcations such that a plurality of bifurcations do not exist in a predetermined neighborhood region; using the extracted coordinates as feature points to track a motion of individual points between the plurality of CT images in a three dimensional space, thereby measuring movement of the organ, the feature points being tracked by point pattern matching in which the plurality of CT images and feature point coordinates are used; narrowing down point pattern matching candidates using a relaxation method that determines a displacement quantity of each of the feature points; and changing the thinned images into a line figure that matches with a center line so that the feature points can be established without changing the thickness and size of the thinned images in topology, the center line having a thickness of one voxel.