Systems and methods for electronically removing lesions from three-dimensional medical images

A method for electronically removing a lesion from a three-dimensional (3D) medical image, comprising:

• constructing, based on a sequence of two-dimensional (2D) slices of the 3D medical image, an intensity-based projection image containing a projection of the lesion;
• segmenting the intensity-based projection image to identify the projection of the lesion;
• deleting the projection of the lesion from the intensity-based projection image;
• and
• processing the intensity-based projection image, after the projection of the lesion is deleted from the intensity-based projection image, to obtain a background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) score.

A system for electronically removing a lesion from a three-dimensional (3D) medical image, comprising:

• a processor;
• a memory communicably coupled with the processor;
• a lesion deleter implemented as machine-readable instructions that are stored in the memory and, when executed by the processor, control the system to:
• segment each two-dimensional (2D) slice of a sequence of 2D slices of the 3D medical image to identify the lesion within one or more of the 2D slices,
• delete the lesion from each 2D slice in which the lesion was identified to create a sequence of lesion-deleted slices, and
• construct, based on the sequence of lesion-deleted slices, a lesion-deleted intensity-based projection image;
• and
• a background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) scorer implemented as machine-readable instructions that are stored in the memory and, when executed by the processor, control the system to process the lesion-deleted intensity-based projection image to obtain a BPE score.