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:
Dec. 06, 2011
Filed:
May. 07, 2009
Mehmet Akif Gulsun, Lawrenceville, NJ (US);
Huseyin Tek, Princeton, NJ (US);
Mehmet Akif Gulsun, Lawrenceville, NJ (US);
Huseyin Tek, Princeton, NJ (US);
Siemens Aktiengesellschaft, München, DE;
Abstract
A method for extracting a centerline of a tubular structure in a digital medical image includes providing a 3-dimensional (3D) digitized medical image having a segmented tubular structure, finding a path in the image between a starting point and every other point in the tubular structure that minimizes an accumulative cost function, wherein the minimum accumulative cost φ(x) at a point x is a minimum of (φ(x')+P) over all nearest neighbors x′ wherein Pis a cost of propagation obtained from the inverse of a medialness measure computed in a plane orthogonal to a line between x and x′ that is centered at a mid-point of the line, the medialness measure m(x) computed in a circular region C(x, R) centered at point x on the line, with radius R, given by  wherein {right arrow over (u)}(α)=sin(α){right arrow over (u)}+cos(α){right arrow over (u)}and {right arrow over (u)}and {right arrow over (u)}define a 2D plane, and ƒ(x,R{right arrow over (u)}(α)) is  wherein M is the number of background points.