Intelligent Atlas for Automatic Image Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A workstation, comprising:

• a receiving engine adapted to receive
• an image data representing a tissue region of a subject,
• an anatomical atlas comprising spatial information of at least one anatomical substructure in the tissue region, and
• a pathological atlas corresponding to an abnormality of said tissue region, wherein the pathological atlas comprises:
• spatial information of a portion of said at least one anatomical substructure;
• statistical quantities associated with said portion of the at least one anatomical substructure;
• a normalizing engine constructed to provide a normalized image data by normalizing the image data, via a transformation, to the anatomical atlas;
• a computing engine configured compute a statistical quantity from image voxels in the normalized image data corresponding to said portion of the at least one anatomical substructure of said tissue region;
• and
• an analyzing engine configured to determine whether said abnormality or a pre-cursor abnormality thereof is present in said subject by analyzing a statistical relationship between the statistical quantity computed from said image data and the statistical quantities in the pathological atlas.

A method of generating a pathological atlas corresponding to an abnormality, comprising:

• receiving, from one of an imaging system, a workstation, or a first data storage device, a first image data representing a tissue region of at least one patient having said abnormality, wherein the first image data comprises a plurality of image voxels, wherein said tissue region has a plurality of anatomical substructures, and wherein the abnormality affects at least one of said plurality of anatomical substructures,
• providing a normalized first image data by normalizing the first image data, via a transformation, to an anatomical atlas corresponding to said tissue region;
• wherein the anatomical atlas comprises data encoding spatial information of the plurality of anatomical substructures, and
• wherein the anatomical atlas is from one of the first data storage device, or a second data storage device;
• creating the pathological atlas corresponding to said abnormality based on the normalized first image data;
• wherein the pathological atlas comprises data encoding spatial information of the at least one of said plurality of anatomical substructures affected by said abnormality;
• and
• storing the pathological atlas corresponding to said tissue abnormality on the data storage system.