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    Copyright:
    1996-2010
    J.A. Sethian
  • Medical Image Segmentation

    The main idea here is to isolate and extract individual components from a medical image. This is an important part of medical imaging; once a shape is found, physicians can measure various quantities, such as the size of tumors and the thickness of heart walls. Tracing the boundary of these shapes by hand is time-consuming. Instead, the goal is an automatic segementation technique which finds the desired regions automatically. This can be done using a combination of fast marching methods and level set methods.

    To demonstrate, below is a two-dimensional cross-section of a scan across the chest: the patient's feet are pointed out of the screen, and the heart, liver, and various other features are visible.
    (If you have trouble getting this page to load, it is a problem of browser compatibilities. Please go here )

    Instructions:
    1. Move the mouse into a region and click
    2. The Java script executes the Fast Marching Method to segment the desired region.
    3. Things to try:
      • Click on individual regions to see the sensitivity of the technique. Notice that the technique often finds boundaries that are not easy to see.
      • Try clicking outside the entire region, and see that the front collapses in on the body.


    Main Reference:

    Malladi, R., Sethian, J.A., and Vemuri, B., Shape Modeling with Front Propagation: A Level Set Approach , IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 17, No. 2, February 1995.