Computer-assisted diagnosis method and system for automatically determining diagnostic saliency of digital images

A computer assisted diagnosis method for automatically determining diagnostic saliency of locations in a digital image comprised of a plurality of pixels, the method comprising the steps of:

• providing a plurality of filters for evaluating the image, wherein each of the plurality of filters is designed to identify a specific type of diagnostic finding;
• providing a virtual window for defining regions in the image at which each of the plurality of filters is applied;
• providing a set of training image patches corresponding to typical appearances of the specific type of diagnostic finding;
• providing a distance measure set corresponding to the training image patches and the regions in the image defined by the virtual window;
• providing a feature set corresponding to the distance measure set;
• applying the plurality of filters to the image to compute distances between the regions in the image defined by the virtual window and the training image patches based on the distance measure set and the feature set, for each of the plurality of filters;
• and
• ranking regions in the image as corresponding to a particular type of diagnostic finding based the computed distances.