Patent ID: 8200015

Claim:
A method for interactively segmenting structures in image data records, comprising: a) displaying an image data record having a structure to be segmented, wherein the image data record is a two-dimensional (2D) image data record that represents a slice of a three-dimensional (3D) image data record; b) selecting a segmentation algorithm to be used, from a group of different segmentation algorithms including a contour-based segmentation algorithm, a region-based segmentation algorithm and manual segmentation, based upon a local image contrast in the region to be segmented in the image data record; c) marking a region to be segmented in the image data record; d) segmenting the structure in the image data record in the marked region using the selected segmentation algorithm, wherein in order to segment the structure in a further slice of the 3D image data record, a cost function of the selected segmentation algorithm used includes a term that takes local parallelism of a segmentation result of the structure in a current slice of the 3D image data record to be segmented and a final segmentation result of a previously segmented slice of the 3D image data record into account, with the previously segmented slice neighboring the further slice in the 3D image data record; e) displaying a segmentation result of the segmentation in the marked region; f) repeating steps b) to e) until the structure in the displayed image data record is completely segmented and a boundary line of the structure is available as a final segmentation result of the displayed image data record; and g) at least one of saving and displaying the final segmentation result.