System for reconstructing surface motion in an optical elastography system
AssigneeTIRO Medical Limited
InventorsJames Geoffrey Chase, Tom Botterill
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method for an optical elastography system converts digital images of an actuated breast into a description of surface motion. The surface motion can subsequently be used to ascertain whether the breast has regions of abnormal stiffness, e.g., indicating a significant likelihood of breast cancer. The steps of the method use a model based segmentation to identify profile of the breast in each image, and for each pair of images computing skin surface motion using an optical flow algorithm. This method eliminates a preliminary step of placing fiducial markers on the subject.
Claims10
A system for analyzing surface motion of body tissue of a subject with optical elastography comprising:
- a controller device that controls a vibration unit capable of stimulating a body tissue of a subject by an actuator that vibrates the body tissue, a plurality of cameras, a strobe light, and a computational device which processes image data from the plurality of cameras, wherein surface motion of body tissue is analyzed by capturing a set of images at a plurality of time-steps of a surface of a region of stimulated tissue with the plurality of cameras distributed about the tissue;
- developing a 3D surface model of the tissue region from the set of images captured at the plurality of time-steps;
- estimating the surface motion of the vibrating body tissue region between time-step images;
- estimating a 3D surface motion of the vibrating body tissue region by combining the 3D surface model with the estimated tissue surface motion between time-step images;
- and
- analyzing the 3D surface motion to identify abnormalities in the motion of the vibrating body tissue region.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.