Recent developments in medical imaging technology have changed the
practice of medicine, providing physicians with powerful, non-invasive
methods for studying the internal anatomy and function of the human
body. These advances in imaging techniques offer both a great
opportunity and a tremendous challenge for the image processing
community to develop new tools to help the analysis and interpretation
of the vast amount of complex medical imaging data. The work presented
in this book is motivated by the fascinating task of studying the
structural and functional relationship of the human brain, with the
specific aim of developing geometrically accurate and topologically
correct methods for automatic segmentation of 3D magnetic resonance
brain images. Several new methods are reported in this book, which
should help provide new insights in understanding the medical image
segmentation problem and the challenges it poses, and help promote
future development in the fields of image processing, signal processing,
computer vision, and medical imaging.