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:
Aug. 20, 2002
Filed:
Nov. 01, 1999
Harvey Ellis Cline, Schenectady, NY (US);
Siegwalt Ludke, Scotia, NY (US);
General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY (US);
Abstract
An imaging system enables cardiac functioning within a particular cardiac chamber to be imaged. The system acquires imaging data that includes intensity values for four-dimensional voxels within a region of interest (ROI). A seed voxel is identified, and neighbor voxels to the seed voxel are also identified. The intensity values for each neighbor voxel are compared to a threshold to determine whether the voxel corresponds to blood or muscle tissue. For each neighbor voxel corresponding to blood, its neighbor voxels are identified and compared to the threshold, and this process is repeated until a pre-established spatial boundary is encountered or the number of new neighbor voxels indicates that processing is migrating into an adjacent cardiac chamber. At that point, the identified blood voxels are counted into bins of cardiac phases, cardiac images for each phase are reconstructed, and parameters such as ejection fraction are calculated.