User-Guided Shape Morphing in Bone Segmentation for Medical Imaging

A semi-automatic approach is used for user-guided bone segmentation in medical imaging. The user indicates a plurality of landmarks on an image of the bone. A processor morphs the same landmarks on a model of the bone to the user input landmarks on the image, resulting in a transform. This transform is then applied to the model to roughly segment the bone. The user may edit the resulting fit, and the processor then refines the edited fit, such as fitting the bone model to the scan data and avoiding any overlap with other bones. This user-guided segmentation may avoid the need for many samples to train a classifier for a fully automated approach while also avoiding the tedious outlining in a manual approach.