TWO-STAGE VARIATIONAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION OF MEDICAL IMAGES USING FRACTURE MECHANICS

摘要

Systems and methods are described for segmenting a medical image using a two-stage variational method in which fracture mechanics are used in the second stage to remove fine-scale contact bridges that connect object contours generated in the first stage. The image segmentation can be used to segment objects, such as bone objects, from surrounding tissues in a medical image, such as an image obtained with a computed tomography (“CT”) or other x-ray imaging system.