Patent Document ID: 5381791
Application ID: 07848769
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of identifying, from image data acquired in a nuclear medicine study of a patient's body, an anatomical feature of interest, comprising: conducting a nuclear medicine study and thereby acquiring an image of the feature, said image including, for each image pixel, an intensity representing a number of detected scintillation events which corresponds to the location of that pixel in the patient's body; establishing, on the basis of the feature to be identified, a scan curve and a scan direction; scanning the image with the scan curve along the scan direction and registering, for each location of the scan curve, the pixels with local intensity maxima and minima; grouping together, in accordance with their connectedness, some of such registered pixels, to form maxima line segments composed exclusively of pixels with local intensity maxima and minima line segments composed exclusively of pixels with local intensity minima; and determining which of said line segments correspond with the feature by identifying whether said line segments satisfy constraints which have been empirically determined to relate to the feature.