Patent Document ID: 10079071
Application ID: 16021881
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for bone removal and vessel visualization in a 3D medical image of a patient, comprising: segmenting bone structures in the 3D medical image, resulting in a bone mask of the 3D medical image; segmenting vessel structures in the 3D medical image, resulting in a vessel mask of the 3D medical image, wherein segmenting bone structures in the 3D medical image and segmenting vessel structures in the 3D medical image are performed independently with respect to each other; refining the bone mask and the vessel mask by fusing information from the bone mask and the vessel mask by: subtracting the vessel mask from the bone mask to remove any voxels segmented in the bone mask and the vessel mask from the bone mask, performing intensity-based thresholding on the 3D medical image to generate a binary thresholding mask of the 3D medical image, subtracting the bone mask and the vessel mask from the binary thresholding mask to identify unlabeled connected components of voxels in the thresholding mask, and labeling the unlabeled connected components of voxels in the thresholding mask based on labels of neighboring connected components in the thresholding mask; and removing bone voxels from the 3D medical image using the refined bone mask to generate a visualization of the vessel structures in the 3D medical image.