Method of volume visualization

• US 7,576,740 B2
• Filed: 02/17/2004
• Issued: 08/18/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 03/06/2003
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Zur Foerderung Der Angewandten Forsching E.V.
• Original Assignee: Fraunhofer-Institut Fur Bildgestutzte Medizin Mevis
• Inventors: Dicken, Volker
• Primary Examiner(s): Wu; Xiao M
• Assistant Examiner(s): Hajnik; Daniel F
• Application Number:
  US10/781,354
• Publication Number:
  US 20040227756A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,009 Days
• Field of Search: 345/424
• US Class Current: 345/424
• CPC Class Codes: G06T 15/40 Hidden part removal

Abstract

The present invention relates to a method of volume visualization in which volumetric data is provided, the volumetric data having first voxels belonging to a reference surface. Second voxels of the volumetric data are determined having a user selected distance from the reference surface. The second voxels are visualized.

Claims

1. A method for revealing a suspicious region in an organ of a body, which comprises:

scanning a preselected region of body tissue that contains an organ of interest to obtain a volumetric database including voxels of the preselected region;

saving the volumetric database in memory as a saved volumetric database;

subjecting the saved volumetric database to a segmentation technique to identify and distinguish an outer surface of the organ from surrounding tissue;

using the outer surface of the organ as a reference surface;

selecting a distance from said outer reference surface of the organ;

extracting from said saved database voxels that are within the organ and that are located at the selected distance from the identified outer reference surface;

extracting from said saved database voxels that are within the organ and that are located at the selected distance from the identified outer reference surface;

after determining the distance from said reference surface for each voxel outside said reference surface, reformatting said voxels by shifting each of said voxels in said reference surface by a distance along a respective parallel line into a common plane while shifting each voxel in each of the lines by the distance that the given voxel in the reference surface in the given line was shifted;

mapping the extracted voxels onto a two-dimensional grid; and

displaying said two-dimensional grid onto a two-dimensional display to reveal any suspicious region in the organ at the selected predetermined distance from the reference surface.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the distance of each of the voxels from the reference surface is determined by a minimum distance measure.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the minimum distance measure is a Euclidean distance.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the volumetric data is medical image data.

5. The method according to claim 4, wherein said volumetric data is a thorax CT scan.

6. The method according to claim 1, wherein the reference surface is a surface of a lung.

7. The method according to claim 4, wherein the reference surface is a surface of a pathological structure.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the volumetric data is three-dimensional microscopy data.

9. The method according to claim 1, wherein said respective parallel lines are orthogonal to said common plane.

10. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises determining the distance from said reference surface for each voxel outside said reference surface by calculating the distance of a given one of the voxels from a voxel in said reference surface along said respective parallel line.

11. The method according to claim 9, which further comprises determining the distance from said reference surface for each voxel outside said reference surface by calculating the distance of a given one of the voxels from a voxel in said reference surface along said respective orthogonal parallel line.

12. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises:

selecting new sample voxels from said set of voxels, said sample voxels being a new distance from said reference surface, the new distance being different from the given distance;

mapping said new sample voxels onto a two-dimensional grid; and

displaying said two-dimensional grid on a two-dimensional display with said voxels with a property designating a suspicious region being distinguishable from said voxels with a property designating the organ.