Medical image segmentation, the task of partitioning an image into meaningful parts, is an important step toward automating medical image analysis and is at the crux of a variety of medical imaging applications, such as computer aided diagnosis, therapy planning and delivery, and computer aided interventions. However, the existence of noise, low contrast and objects' complexity in medical images are critical obstacles that stand in the way of achieving an ideal segmentation system. Incorporating prior knowledge into image segmentation algorithms has proven useful for obtaining more accurate and plausible results. This paper surveys the different types of prior knowledge that have been utilized in different segmentation frameworks. We focus our survey on optimization-based methods that incorporate prior information into their frameworks. We review and compare these methods in terms of the types of prior employed, the domain of formulation (continuous vs. discrete), and the optimization techniques (global vs. local). We also created an interactive online database of existing works and categorized them based on the type of prior knowledge they use. Our website is interactive so that researchers can contribute to keep the database up to date. We conclude the survey by discussing different aspects of designing an energy functional for image segmentation, open problems, and future perspectives.

本文综述了应用于不同分割框架中的不同类型的先验知识，重点介绍了将先验信息纳入其框架的基于优化的方法，并根据使用的先验知识类型对现有工作进行了分类。研究人员可以通过我们的互动在线数据库更新其研究领域。此外，我们还讨论了能量函数设计的不同方面、存在的问题和未来的前景。

医学图像分割中的先验知识: 一项调查