The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 20, 2001
Filed:
Apr. 09, 1998
Harvey Ellis Cline, Schenectady, NY (US);
Allen Robert Tannenbaum, Edina, MN (US);
General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY (US);
Abstract
The noise reduction system of the present invention takes into account that noise is random with little between images adjacent physically, and in sampling time. It also takes into account the fact that some sequences of images are cyclical and “wrap around” in time with the beginning closely resembling the end of the cycle. A filter was developed which would smooth noise in a direction along an edge, but will not blur across an edge. It operates by determining vectors tangential to a surface point p, at a current voxel, and projecting 4D data onto the tangential vectors. A curvature matrix B,is determined. The eigenvalues of curvature matrix B,are determined to result in three curvatures for 4 dimensions. If the sign of all of the eigenvalues is the same, the current voxel is filtered, else, it is unchanged. This filtering is repeated for a number of voxels as the current voxel within a desired region for a single iteration. Preferably, this is repeated for several iterations to result in filtered data with reduced noise and little change in detail. The filtered data may then be segmented to separate structures. The segmented structures may then be used in analysis, such as in medical diagnosis.