Medical Image Segmentation: A Review

Image segmentation is the most critical functions in image analysis and processing. Fundamentally segmentation results affect all the subsequent processes of image analysis such as object representation and description, feature measurement, and even the following higher level tasks such as object classification. Hence, image segmentation is the most essential and crucial process for facilitating the delineation, characterization, and visualization of regions of interest in any medical image. Manual segmentation of medical image by the radiologist is not only a tedious and time consuming process, but also not very accurate especially with the increasing medical imaging modalities and unmanageable quantity of medical images that need to be examined. It becomes therefore necessary to review current methodologies of image segmentation using automated algorithms that are accurate and require as little user interaction as possible especially for medical images. In the segmentation process, the anatomical structure or the region of interest needs to be delineated and extracted out so that it can be viewed individually. In this paper we project the important place of segmentation of images in extracting information for decision making.