The invention is directed toward methods for assisting in interpreting medical images, especially useful for segmenting images produced by computed tomography or micro-computed tomography. In one embodiment, the invention is directed to method comprising initially identifying the images of the bones from a medical image, estimating a preliminary boundary of the bones, and subsequently segmenting the bones using a snake algorithm initialized by the preliminary boundary of the bones. The results can then be used to establish morphometric measurements from the medical images based on the segmented bone boundaries. In one embodiment of the present invention, the snake algorithm used is a continuous parametric Fourier series representation to fit and optimize the preliminary boundary of the bones to a more accurate representation of the segmented bone boundary from the data included in the image.
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