Level set based segmentation with intensity and curvature priors

A method is presented for segmentation of anatomical structures that incorporates prior information about the intensity and curvature profile of the structure from a training set of images and boundaries. Specifically the authors model the intensity distribution as a function of signed distance from the object boundary, instead of modeling only the intensity of the object as a whole. A curvature profile acts as a boundary regularization term specific to the shape being extracted, as opposed to simply penalizing high curvature. Using the prior model, the segmentation process estimates a maximum a posteriori higher dimensional surface whose zero level set converges on the boundary of the object to be segmented. Segmentation results are demonstrated on synthetic data and magnetic resonance imagery