A novel volumetric feature extraction technique, with applications to MR images

The in vivo morphological and volumetric analysis of biological structures is a topic which is of increasing interest in the medical community. Such an analysis requires the extraction of the feature of interest from volumetric magnetic resonance (MR), ultrasound (US) or computed tomography (CT) scans. The difficulty of this extraction varies with the modality used and the morphology of the structure of interest, but in many cases current practice requires the manual outlining of the structure on each slice of the scanned volume-a time consuming and tedious task. We seek to provide an automated algorithm which accomplishes this task with minimal a priori knowledge and operator input and with an accuracy which is comparable to that of the current manual and semi-automated techniques.