A snake for CT image segmentation integrating region and edge information

Abstract

Abstract The 3D representation and solid modeling of knee bone structures taken from computed tomography (CT) scans are necessary processes in many medical applications. The construction of the 3D model is generally carried out by stacking the contours obtained from a 2D segmentation of each CT slice, so the quality of the 3D model strongly depends on the precision of this segmentation process. In this work we present a deformable contour method for the problem of automatically delineating the external bone (tibia and fibula) contours from a set of CT scan images. We have introduced a new region potential term and an edge focusing strategy that diminish the problems that the classical snake method presents when it is applied to the segmentation of CT images. We introduce knowledge about the location of the object of interest and knowledge about the behavior of edges in scale space, in order to enhance edge information. We also introduce a region information aimed at complementing edge information. The novelty in that is that the new region potential does not rely on prior knowledge about image statistics; the desired features are derived from the segmentation in the previous slice of the 3D sequence. Finally, we show examples of 3D reconstruction demonstrating the validity of our model. The performance of our method was visually and quantitatively validated by experts.