Patent ID: 8023708

Claim:
A method of segmenting an anatomic entity in a digital medical image comprising: defining, for each of a number of landmarks in said image, an initial position of said landmark, sampling a neighborhood around said initial position, said neighborhood comprising a number of candidate locations of said landmark, associating a cost with each of said candidate locations, optimizing a cost function expressing a weighted sum of overall gray level cost and overall shape cost for all candidate locations, defining a segmented anatomic entity as a path through a selected combination of said candidate locations for which combination said cost function is optimized, wherein said cost associated with a candidate location is the total gray level cost obtained by summing gray level costs of said candidate location in every feature image of a set of feature images calculated from said medical image, said gray level costs being expressed as the Mahalanobis distance defined as the distance between the gray value profile at said candidate location with a corresponding mean profile weighted by the inverse of a corresponding covariance matrix, said mean profile and covariance matrix retrieved from a gray value model associated with said anatomic entity.