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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol Endod. 2011 Apr 16;111(6):757–770. doi: 10.1016/j.tripleo.2011.02.002

Figure 2. Image segmentation.

Figure 2

Cone beam CT images are imported as DICOM files into ITK Snap. In a process known as semiautomatic segmentation, anatomical areas of interest are identified and delineated to construct virtual surface models of the hard tissues of the face. The automatic segmentation procedures in ITK-SNAP use 2 active contour methods to compute feature images based on the CBCT image’s gray level intensity and boundaries. Manual editing is performed to ensure accuracy of the segmentations. It takes approximately 1 hour for a trained student to generate the surface model. The images can be viewed in three dimensions and as axial, coronal, and sagittal slices of each image.