Patent ID: 8094906

Claim:
A method of automatically identifying bone components in a medical image data set of voxels, each voxel having a value of image density, the method comprising: a) applying a first set of one or more tests to accept voxels as belonging to seeds; b) applying a second set of one or more tests to accept seeds as bone seeds; and c) expanding the bone seeds into bone components, comprising identifying a candidate voxel as a bone voxel if said candidate voxel has a score less than a threshold value, the score of a candidate voxel being an integral of a local cost of voxels along a connected path of voxels from a bone seed voxel to said candidate voxel, for which said integral is minimized; wherein the local cost of a voxel being evaluated depends on a hollowness measure, the calculation of which takes into account the densities of other voxels around the voxel being evaluated, which hollowness measure, if the voxel being evaluated is on the surface of a volume with a lower density outside the volume, indicates a greater degree of hollowness if the density inside the volume is lower than the density of the voxel being evaluated, than if the density of the volume is uniform.