Overview of Current Biomedical Image Segmentation Methods

Abstract

Medical image processing is a very active and fast-growing field that has evolved into an established discipline. Accurate segmentation of medical images is a fundamental step in clinical studies for diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment planning. Manual segmentation of medical images is a time consuming and a tedious task. Therefore the automated segmentation algorithms with high accuracy are of interest. There are several critical factors that determine the performance of a segmentation algorithm. Examples are: the area of application of segmentation technique, reproducibility of the method, accuracy of the results, etc. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of current image segmentation methods. Their relative efficiency, advantages, and the problems they encounter are discussed. In order to evaluate the segmentation results, some popular benchmark measurements are presented.