Patent Document ID: 20170287133
Application ID: 15508079
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of generating multi-parametric nosological images, comprising the steps of: a) obtaining a stack of medical images; b) processing the stack of medical images, through the steps of: b1) subjecting each image to a noise filtering; b2) registering each image to a reference space; b3) eliminating from at least some of the images areas corresponding to peripheral tissues of a region of interest; b4) correcting inhomogeneities in at least some of the images; c) reducing the stack of images to a new representation space of smaller dimension, which maintains or increases discriminative properties of original data in the stack of images; d) classifying in an unsupervised manner units of the stack of images obtained in step c) according to a pre-established number of classes and without biological interpretation of the units of the stack of images obtained in step c); e) automatically assigning multi-parametric profiles to the classes obtained in step d), through the steps of: e1) registering in a non-linear manner a reference template of a region of interest to the stack of images; e2) correcting probability maps of healthy tissues of the reference template in pathological areas; e3) identifying which classes obtained in step d) represent non-pathological tissues by using the probability maps of healthy tissues corrected in step e2); e4) eliminating peripheral and minimal classes from the set of classes obtained in step d) to produce a remaining set of classes; and e5) merging in the pathological areas the remaining set of classes from step d) through agglomerative hierarchical classification using distances between probability density functions; and f) generating a nosological image through the classes obtained in steps e3) and e5).