Techniques for Medical Image Segmentation
Przemyslaw Lenkiewicz, Manuela Pereira, Mário M. Freire, José Fernandes · Advances in medical technologies and clinical practice book series · 2010
This chapter contains a survey of the most popular techniques for medical image segmentation that have been gaining attention of the researchers and medical practitioners since the early 1980s until present time. Those methods are presented in chronological order along with their most important features, examples of the results that they can bring and examples of application. They are also grouped into three generations, each of them representing a significant evolution in terms of algorithms’ novelty and obtainable results compared to the previous one. This survey helps to understand what have been the main ideas standing behind respective segmentation methods and how were they limited by the available technology. In the following part of this chapter several of promising, recent methods are evaluated and compared based on a selection of important features. Together with the survey from the first section this serves to show which are the directions currently taken by researchers and which of them have the potential to be successful.