Abstract #0880

Deng X, Narayana P

A fast unsupervised method for contour extraction in high resolution in vivo rat spinal cord MR images is developed and implemented. This technique is based on a B-spline snake defined in polar coordinate system. It deforms toward the spinal cord contour by minimization of a weighted sum of the external and internal energy of the snake. Our experimental results on 24 images from 3 normal rats demonstrate that this method can detect the spinal cord contours in 1.6 seconds. This method is highly reproducible and the computed contours correlate well with manually defined contours.