Patent Document ID: 7680312
Application ID: 11429685
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for use in segmenting an object of interest from an image of a patient having such object, comprising: using medical imaging apparatus to perform the steps of: transforming a generated reference shape of the object to match every one of a plurality of training shapes according to an energy function comprising distorting each one of the training shapes to overlay the reference shape with a parameter Θ i , being a measure of the amount of distortion required at each grid point to effect the overlay for the i th one of the N training shapes; obtaining a vector of the parameters Θ i , for every one of the training shapes through the minimization of a cost function; estimating an uncertainty for every one of the obtained vectors of parameters Θ i , such uncertainty being quantified as a covariance matrix Σ i ; providing for the plurality of training shapes a statistical model represented as {circumflex over (f)} H (Θ,Σ) which is the sum of the K Gaussian kernels having a mean Θ i and covariance Σ i .