United States patent granted to Visiana

The US patent office has granted Visiana a patent for the invention of an image processing method.

A key element of BoneXpert is to locate each bone accurately as a first step in the bone age analysis. Visiana has invented a new method to locate a landmark, e.g. the tip of a bone. About 100 examples are needed for the machine learning method, which trains a decision tree to predict the location from a nearby image patch. The predictions from more than 300 patches are placed in a voting map, and the peak of votes yields the landmark location with subpixel accuracy. The figure shows the voting map for finding the tip of a distal phalanx.

The invention could also be useful in land vehicles and smartphones.