US Patent 7715626 System and method for vascular segmentation by Monte-Carlo sampling

A method of segmenting tubular structures in digital images includes selecting a point in an image of a tubular object to be segmented, defining an initial state of the selected point, initializing measurement weights, a conditional probability distribution and a prior probability distribution of a feature space of the initial state, sampling the feature space from the prior probability distribution, estimating a posterior probability distribution by summing sample measurements weighted by the measurement weights, and segmenting a cross section of the tubular object from the posterior probability distribution.