Appeal No. 1997-1655
Application 07/797,893
"in a realtime
manner" as data is being automatically extracted and expanded, allowing for operator viewing and
editing of the image during, as opposed to after (as in the prior art), the extraction and expansion
process.
In general, appellants’ invention recited in representative independent claim 13 on appeal
provides a method for displaying a three-dimensional image using a region extracting process which
automatically performs extraction and expansion steps on voxel data, wherein the processed image is
displayed "in a realtime manner simultaneously with repetitions of said expansion substep" (claim 13 on
appeal, last paragraph). By displaying images in a realtime manner during the expansion substep, the
method of claim 13 is able to monitor the sequential change of extracted regions after each repetition of
the expansion substep, thereby monitoring the expansion process (Brief, page 7). As further discussed,
infra, we find that the applied references to Crawford (‘148 and ‘202) and Robb fail to teach or
suggest at least this salient feature as it is recited in the claims on appeal.
Representative claim 13 is reproduced below:
13. A method for displaying region extracting processing in an image processing system to
perspectively project 3-dimensional voxel data onto a 2-dimensional display, said method comprising
the steps of:
3
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