Interactive medical image segmentation with united snakes

Abstract

Snakes have become a standard image analysis technique with several variants now in common use. We have developed a software package called “United Snakes”. It unifies the most important snake variants, including finite difference, B-spline, and Hermite polynomial snakes, within the framework of a general finite element formulation with a choice of shape functions. Furthermore, we have incorporated into united snakes a recently proposed snake-like technique known as “livewire”, via a method for imposing hard constraints on snakes. Here, we demonstrate that the combination of techniques in united snakes yields generality, accuracy, ease of use, and robustness in several medical image analysis applications, including the segmentation of neuronal dendrites in EM images, dynamic chest image analysis, and the quantification of growth plates.