Patent Document ID: 9177105
Application ID: 14226083

Base Claim:
1. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method of associating gland orientation disorder with malignancy and risk of post-surgical biochemical recurrence (BCR) in a prostate cancer (CaP) patient, the method comprising: accessing a digitized image of a section of a prostate demonstrating pathology associated with CaP in the patient; detecting a gland in a region of interest of the digitized image; segmenting an individual gland boundary in the region of interest in the digitized image into a set of gland boundary points; producing a gland tensor by associating a tensor with the gland, where the gland tensor indicates the dominant orientation of the gland, and where the gland tensor is based on the major axis of the gland; constructing a subgraph of a localized gland network within the region of interest, where constructing the subgraph comprises linking individual glands located proximal to each other into the localized gland network, where the nodes of the subgraph represent individual gland centroids, and where the edges of the subgraph are defined between pairs of glands by a probabilistic decaying function; constructing a tensor co-occurrence matrix, where elements of the tensor co-occurrence matrix comprise gland tensor pairs, where the gland tensor pairs are defined by the subgraph, and where the tensor co-occurrence matrix aggregates co-occurring gland tensors based, at least in part, on the frequency with which orientations of two individual glands located proximal to each other co-occur; deriving second-order statistics of gland orientations in the localized gland networks in the digitized image; selectively differentiating a cancerous tissue region from a non-cancerous tissue region in the image based, at least in part, on the second-order statistics; and establishing a BCR score for the patient based, at least in part, on the second-order statistics.

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Claim 2:
2. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , where detecting a gland and segmenting an individual gland boundary comprises controlling the computer to: access a color space luminance channel image of the region of interest, where glands in the color space luminance channel image appear as contiguous, high intensity pixel regions; produce a convolved luminance image by convolving the color space luminance channel image with a Gaussian kernel; detect a seed pixel corresponding to a peak intensity in the convolved luminance image, where the seed pixel represents a current region (CR); initialize a bounding box around the seed pixel; denote eight connected pixels surrounding the seed pixel as a current boundary (CB); produce a removed CB pixel by removing the pixel in the CB with the highest intensity from the CB, and upon determining that the removed CB pixel is not outside the bounding box: controlling the computer to incorporate the removed CB pixel into the CR as a new CR pixel; incorporate the eight connected pixels surrounding the new CR pixel not already in the CR into the CB; define an internal boundary (IB) as all CR pixels adjacent to the CB, and define a boundary strength as the mean intensity of the pixels in the IB minus the mean intensity of the pixels in the CB.