Mathematical morphology for 3-D image analysis

A 3-D segmentation algorithm is presented to extract object surfaces from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. The algorithm is formulated in the framework of mathematical morphology. The generalized morphological operators are proposed for multidimensional segmentation. A priori knowledge of the approximate location of the object surface is communicated to the algorithm via the definition of the search space. The algorithm uses this definition of the search space to obtain the surface candidate elements. The search-space specification reduces the computational cost and increases the reliability of the detected features. The detected surface is represented as a hierarchical combination of patches. Initial results obtained by using the algorithm to segment 4-D images of the beating heart are presented