Automating the segmentation of medical images for the production of voxel tomographic computational models

Radiation dosimetry for the diagnostic medical imaging procedures performed on humans requires anatomically accurate, computational models. These may be constructed from medical images as voxel-based tomographic models. However, they are time consuming to produce and as a consequence, there are few available. This paper discusses the emergence of semi-automatic segmentation techniques and describes an application (iRAD) written in Microsoft Visual Basic that allows the bitmap of a medical image to be segmented interactively and semi-automatically while displayed in Microsoft Excel. iRAD will decrease the time required to construct voxel models.