Stable 3D Mass-Spring Models for the Segmentation of the Thyroid Cartilage

The preoperative planning of primary tumor resections in the larynx region shall be supported by a 3D visualization of the patient- specific anatomy and pathological situation. This requires a segmentation of the larynx cartilage structures from CT datasets. In our work, we apply and adapt stable 3D mass-spring models to create a 3D deformable shape model for the segmentation of the thyroid carti- lage. A new concept for elastic initialization of the model is presented, allowing the deformable model to adapt specifically to patient-specific shape variations and pathological deformations.