THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBJECT TRANSFORMATION FOR DIVIDING OBJECT IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL MEDICAL IMAGE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an apparatus and a method for reducing the processing load during object division by transforming the object into a regularly shaped geometry before its division if the object is irregularly shaped.SOLUTION: The present invention defines a method and an apparatus for dividing an object from a three-dimensional image. First, a surface of the object is estimated using scale estimation processes such as Laplacian-of-Gaussian filters in one, two or three dimensions. Second, the estimated surface is transformed by applying a shrink function to the estimated surface independently in each dimension to give a regularly shaped (preferably substantially spherical) nonisotropic geometry. The object is divided from its background volume and inverse-transformed to resume the original shape, which is then isolated from the image volume.SELECTED DRAWING: Figure 3