Patent Document ID: 20180158547
Application ID: 15819995
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A medical system for determining metastases in an image of an anatomical body part, comprising: an analytical device for generating images of an anatomical body part; at least one computer operable to receive the images from the analytical device and having at least one processor and memory with instructions, the analytical device operable to receive an enhanced image of the anatomical body part using a contrasting agent and receive a non-enhanced image of the anatomical body part without using the contrasting agent, the instructions, when executed on the computer, configuring the computer to: spatially correlate the enhanced image and the non-enhanced image to create a common reference system; wherein both the enhanced image and the non-enhanced image include two dimensional layers of voxels; transform at least one of the enhanced image and the non-enhanced image to create a bijective assignment between the voxels and the respective image; create a normalized difference image and acquire a non-tumor region in both the enhanced image and the non-enhanced image; wherein each of the voxels of the enhanced image and the voxels of the non-enhanced image have voxel intensities and wherein the normalized difference image has a plurality of voxels each with an associated voxel intensity; acquire an intensity threshold of the normalized difference image to differentiate between the voxel intensities caused by the contrast agent and the voxel intensities not caused by the contrast agent; using the intensity threshold to determine a three-dimensional binary image, acquire metastasis geometry data which describe geometrical properties of a metastasis in the binary image; determine a set of adjacent image elements; analyze the 2D properties of the set; and determine that the set represents a metastasis if the set exhibits two-dimensional geometrical properties which comply with the geometrical properties described by the metastasis geometry data.