Three dimensional connectivity method and system employing an equivalence schema for determining connected substructures within a body

摘要

An apparatus and method for determining connected substructures within a body is disclosed. The system and method are particularly advantageous for use in medical diagnostic imaging applications. In particular, three dimensional regions exhibiting the same tissue type are similarly labeled. The system and method of the present invention is operable in any situation in which three dimensional signal patterns representing the value of one or more physical properties associated with the substructures within a body at regularly spaced grid locations within the body are presented. A subset of the original data may then be provided to a display processor, particularly one employ­ing gradient normal shading for display of three dimensional images. Even more particularly, the present invention is related to a method and system for determining equivalence classes of of objects, the objects typically comprising one or two dimensional connected regions found in a planar slice of data from magnetic resonance imaging or x-ray tomography systems.