TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

(Under the Direction of Hamid Arabnia) The National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project is a digital image library containing full color anatomical, CT and MR images representing an adult male and female. Segmentation of the Visible Human datasets offers many additions to the original goal of a three-dimensional representation of a computer generated anatomical model of the human body. This paper presents an automatic segmentation algorithm called the Medical Image Segmentation Technique, MIST, which is based on a seeded region growing approach. The technique repeatedly extracts anatomical regions of interest from two-dimensional cross section images to create three-dimensional visualizations of these anatomical organs, bones and tissues. Resulting segmentations of this technique are compared with existing segmentation algorithms. This method proves to produce better whole organ and tissue segmentations than existing algorithms