Marching cores: a method for extracting cores from 3D medical images

The authors present an algorithm, called marching cores, that generates cores of 3D medical images and also generalizes to finding implicitly defined manifolds of codimension greater than one. As one marches along the core, one use medialness kernels to generate new medialness values and then find ridges in the extended medial space using the geometric definition of height ridges and mathematical models of manifold intersections. Results from both a test image and a CT image illustrate the algorithm.