Segmentation of jointed regions using spring model

Abstract

Surgery simulation is one of the most important application field in virtual reality. Because each organ has physical properties such as stiffness, hardness and so on, segmentation of internal organs is indispensable for surgery simulation. But it is difficult to segment regions of organs automatically, because that image has uncertain part. Therefore, we propose a new method that creates spring model from the image, and separate the jointed regions by the force worked at operator designated place. Experiments using artificial images and a medical image, are achieved, whose results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.