Nevertheless, progress has been made in the field of automatic analysis of medical
images over the last few years thanks to improvements in hardware, acquisition
methods, signal processing techniques, and of course mathematics. Curvature
driven flows have proven to be an excellent tool for a number of image processing
tasks and have definitely had a major impact on the technology base. Several algorithms
based on partial differential equation methods have been incorporated into
clinical software and are available in open software packages such as the National
Library of Medicine Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) [48], and
the 3D Slicer of the HarvardMedical School [90]. These projects are very important
in disseminating both standard and new mathematical methods in medical imaging
to the broader community.