Appeal No. 1997-1655
Application 07/797,893
Answer. Accordingly, claims 13 to 20 are before us for consideration on appeal.
BACKGROUND
The subject matter on appeal is directed to a method for three-dimensionally displaying an
image (e.g., a medical image such as that from an MRI, X-ray, CT, etc.) by operating on voxel data,
where voxel data is three-dimensional image data expressed by a set of small cubes called voxels (see
specification, page 1; Brief, page 3). More specifically, the method involves processing three-
dimensional data from a plurality of cross-sectional images which are scanned in by a medical
diagnosing apparatus (i.e., MRI, X-ray, CT, etc.)(see specification, page 1; Brief, page 3). As
indicated in the specification (pages 6 to 8), a prior art manual region extracting method is known to be
employed in order to extract a designated organ from three-dimensional medical image or voxel data to
three-dimensionally display the designated organ. Appellants recognized that extraction of such a large
amount of voxel data such as is associated with an organ is not practical in the clinical field, and a real-
time executable method would be better (see specification, page 6). As recognized by appellants,
conventional manual extraction techniques suffer from the disadvantage that it is difficult to completely
extract a region of interest (such as an organ), and in order to "always obtain a clinically adequate
image, the interposition of an operator is inevitable in the procedure of extraction" (see specification,
page 8). Thus, a key difference between the prior art and the invention recited in representative
independent claim 13 on appeal is that in the recited invention display and editing of image data occurs
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