Integrated imaging apparatus

Abstract

The invention is directed to imaging apparatus for performing real-time or near real-time assessment and monitoring. Embodiments of the device are useful in a plurality of settings including surgery, clinical procedures, tissue assessment, diagnostic procedures, forensic, health monitoring and medical evaluations.

Description

REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001] This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application, Serial No. 60 / 142,067, filed Jul. 2, 1999.[0002] 1. Field of the Invention[0003] The invention is directed to an imaging apparatus and methods for performing assessment and monitoring with interpreted imaging. Embodiments of the invention are particularly useful in surgery, clinical procedures, tissue assessment, diagnostic procedures, health monitoring, and medical evaluations.[0004] 2. Description of the Background[0005] Spectroscopy, whether it is visible, near infrared, infrared or Raman, is an enormously powerful tool for the analysis of biomedical samples. The medical community, however, has a definite preference for imaging methods, as exemplified by methods such as MRI and CT scanning as well as standard X-ray photography and ultrasound imaging. This is entirely understandable as many factors need to be taken into account for a physician to make a clinical diagnos...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, the volume of information contained in spectroscopic images can make standard data processing techniques cumbersome.

Furthermore, there are few techniques that can demarcate which regions of a spectroscopic image contain similar spectra without a priori knowledge of either the spectral data or the sample's composition.

There are few techniques that can demarcate which regions of a sample contain similar substances without a priori knowledge of the sample's composition.

While it is now clear that both spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging can play roles in providing medically relevant information, the raw spectral or imaging measurement seldom reveals directly the property of clinical interest.

For example using spectroscopy, one cannot easily determine whether the tissue is cancerous, or determine blood glucose concentrations and the adequacy of tissue perfusion.

The very reason why multiple scans are useful is what makes the registration process difficult.

As each modality images tissue differently and has its own artifacts and noise characteristics, accurately modeling the intensity relationship between the scans, and subsequently aligning them, is difficult.

The main drawback of this method is that the markers must remain attached to the patient at the same positions throughout all image acquisitions.

For applications such as change detection over months or years, this registration method is not suitable.

In general, methods of feature extraction such as intensity thresholding or edge detection do not work well on medical scans, due to non-linear gain fields and highly textured structures.

Even manual identification of corresponding 3D anatomical points can be unreliable.

Without the ability to accurately localize corresponding features in the images, alignment in this manner is difficult.

Therefore, two images that have a simple linear intensity relationship may be straightforward to register, but do not provide any additional information than one scan by itself.

On the other hand, if the images are completely independent (e.g. no intensity relationship exists between them), then they cannot be registered using voxel-based methods.

In general, explicitly computing the function F that relates two imaging modalities is difficult and under-constrained.

However, when this information is available, the prior joint intensity model provides the registration algorithm with additional guidance which results in convergence on the correct alignment more quickly, more reliably and from more remote initial starting points.

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