Fast approximate surface evolution in arbitrary dimension

©2008 SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited. The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.771080Presented at Medical Imaging 2008: Image Processing, February 17-19, 2008, San Diego, CA, USA.DOI:10.1117/12.771080The level set method is a popular technique used in medical image segmentation; however, the numerics involved make its use cumbersome. This paper proposes an approximate level set scheme that removes much of the computational burden while maintaining accuracy. Abandoning a floating point representation for the signed distance function, we use integral values to represent the signed distance function. For the cases of 2D and 3D, we detail rules governing the evolution and maintenance of these three regions. Arbitrary energies can be implemented in the framework. This scheme has several desirable properties: computations are only performed along the zero level set; the approximate distance function requires only a few simple integer comparisons for maintenance; smoothness regularization involves only a few integer calculations and may be handled apart from the energy itself; the zero level set is represented exactly removing the need for interpolation off the interface; and evolutions proceed on the order of milliseconds per iteration on conventional uniprocessor workstations. To highlight its accuracy, flexibility and speed, we demonstrate the technique on intensity-based segmentations under various statistical metrics. Results for 3D imagery show the technique is fast even for image volumes