Automatic organ localization

Abstract

Automatic organ localization is described. In an example, an organ in a medical image is localized using one or more trained regression trees. Each image element of the medical image is applied to the trained regression trees to compute probability distributions that relate to a distance from each image element to the organ. At least a subset of the probability distributions are selected and aggregated to calculate a localization estimate for the organ. In another example, the regression trees are trained using training images having a predefined organ location. At each node of the tree, test parameters are generated that determine which subsequent node each training image element is passed to. This is repeated until each image element reaches a leaf node of the tree. A probability distribution is generated and stored at each leaf node, based on the distance from the leaf node's image elements to the organ.