Patent Document ID: 8953856
Application ID: 12624505
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A computerized method for registering a medical image with a model mapping a skeletal structure, comprising: a computerized system receiving a medical image depicting a plurality of bones; said computerized system providing a statistical model mapping a reference skeletal structure having a plurality of reference anatomical elements, wherein the statistical model of at least one of the reference anatomical elements comprises a distribution of a plurality of respective anatomical characteristics of the at least one of the reference anatomical elements in a plurality of medical images; said computerized system registering anatomical elements in said medical image with corresponding anatomical elements in said statistical model according to at least one constraint defined by said plurality of reference anatomical elements, and said computerized system producing an image transformation corresponding to the registering; wherein said registering comprises searching for a warping transformation, defined by parameters of an affine transformation and warping parameters, that increases a matching score of the medical image to the reference skeletal structure, wherein the searching is done progressively in a plurality of iterations, with different reduced sets of warping parameters defining warping local to different bones or groups of bones, the parameters being allowed to vary their values in different iterations.