Local Level Set Segmentation with Topological Structures

Locating and segmenting objects such as bones or internal organs is a common problem in medical imaging. Existing segmentation methods are often cumbersome to use for medical staff, since they require a close initial guess and a range of different parameters to be set appropriately. For this work, we present a two-stage segmentation framework which relies on an initial isosurface interactively extracted by topological analysis. The initial isosurface seldom provides a correct segmentation, so we refine the surface using an iterative level set method to better match the desired object boundary. We present applications and improvements to both the flexible isosurface interface and level set segmentation without edges