US Patent 9990712 Organ detection and segmentation

A method of segmenting a target organ of the body in medical images, the method comprising: providing a probabilistic atlas with probabilities for a presence of the target organ at different locations relative to a bounding region of the target organ; providing one or more medical test images; for each test image, identifying, at least provisionally, a location of a bounding region for the target organ in the test image; and for each test image, using the probabilities from the probabilistic atlas to segment the target organ in the test image, with the segmenting performed by a data processor.