Intelligent Scissors for Medical Image Segmentation
Detlev Stalling, Hans‐Christian Hege · 1996
Recently a new method for interactive image segmentation called Intelligent Scissors has been proposed by Mortensen and Barrett. Based on optimal path searching in a graph network, the method has a number of advantages over previous approaches. It is fast, robust, and very intuitively to use. Originally designed as a general-purpose tool for image manipulation, we have applied the method for medical image segmentation within an interactive contour editor. In this paper we describe some results and conclusions from our work. We also suggest a number of modifications of the original algorithm improving both, quality and performance of the method. A common requirement is to obtain smooth contours, i.e. contours free of sudden directional changes. Such smoothness constraints are quite difficult to implement using traditional edge costs, but may be achieved easily using a simple graph pruning strategy. This method not only avoids acute angles but also implies a 25% performance gain. Althou...