Semi-automatic active contour approach to segmentation of computed tomography volumes
Sven Lončarić, Domagoj Kovačević, Erich Sorantin · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
In this paper a method for three-dimensional (3-D) semi- automatic segmentation of volumes of medical images is described. The method is semi-automatic in the sense that, in the initial phase, the user assistance is required for manual segmentation of a certain number of slices (cross-sections) of the volume. In the second phase, the algorithm for automatic segmentation is started. The segmentation algorithm is based on the active contour approach. A semi 3-D active contour algorithm is used in the sense that additional inter-slice forces are introduced in order to constrain the obtained solution. The energy function which is minimized is modified to exploit information provided by the manual segmentation of some of the slices performed by the user. The experiments have been performed using computed tomography (CT) scans of the abdominal region of the human body. In particular, CT images of abdominal aortic aneurysms have been segmented to determine the location of aorta. The experiments have shown the feasibility of the approach.