Applicants have discovered a new low-cost and accessible method and apparatus that allowing for quicker and more precise state determinations based on medical images. The method and apparatus are non-intrusive and require providing a medical image of a subject and determining a state based on a comparison to a training image set comprising two or more states. There is provided, according to the present invention, a computer-implemented method for processing medical images comprising calculating non-local means patch-based weights comparing patches surrounding pixels of interest in a test image with a number of patches of pixels surrounding a corresponding number of pixels in reference images； and calculating for the pixels of interest at least one state estimation using a given state assigned to said reference images and said weights.
