Patent ID: 8290223

Claim:
A method for segmenting a digital medical image comprising: a. computing an initial segmentation class label for each pixel on the basis of a K-means clustering algorithm and computing associated class centroids and gamma functions, a gamma function weighting the importance of likelihood potential and clique potential in an energy function; b. computing an energy measure for a current pixel associated with assigning each label in turn to the pixel, the energy measure being a sum of two components: a measure of the distance between the pixel's feature value and the value of the centroid indicated by the current segmentation label, and a measure of the difference of the assigned label and the label of at least one neighboring pixel; c. selecting the label for the current pixel yielding the lowest energy; d. recalculating the segmentation class centroids and gamma functions; e. proceeding to the next pixel until all pixels in the image are visited; f. iterating steps b-e until the class labels of the image pixels do not change so as to yield the final segmentation of the image.