Patent ID: 7773786

Claim:
A method for segmenting anatomical objects from medical images, said method comprising a computer unit that performs the steps of: acquiring an axial curve and an orthogonal curve from a set of medical images; modifying the orthogonal curve to intersect the axial curve when the axial curve and the orthogonal curve, as acquired, do not intersect; generating template shapes for axial slices of the set of medical images using shape-based interpolation, the template shapes are generated for axial slices lacking user-drawn curves; locating attractor points by the intersections of the orthogonal curve and the axial curve; computing transformation parameters for axial slices lacking user-drawn curves, wherein the step of computing transformation parameters for axial slices lacking user-drawn curves is performed by carrying out the steps of: complementing an input when the input does not account for sagittal or coronal input; computing the closest contour points to the attractor points for each slice; iteratively computing the parameters of a two-dimensional affine transformation; and optionally smoothing the transformation parameters; and executing the transformation on said template shapes for the axial slices.