Progress of medical image segmentation technology

Medical image segmentation is a classical puzzle for researchers.Image segmentation is the method to delineate anatomic structures or other interested regions automatically or semi-automatically,which is helpful to diagnosis and plays a crucial role in many medical imaging applications.In this article,a rather complete survey to medical image segmentation methods and their characteristics are given,especially to the new methods or improvement of the classical methods which was put forward recently.The prospects and the challenge of medical image segmentation is discussed.