1. A method for 3D volume segmentation in digitized medical images comprising the steps of: providing a digitized medical 3D image, said image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points on an N-dimensional lattice; obtaining an oriented closed 2-dimensional contour on one or more 2-dimensional slices from said image; defining face weights w from said image intensities by forming a dual lattice of said image lattice; minimizing ∑ i ⁢ ⁢ ⁢ w i ⁢ z i summed over all faces subject to the constraint Bz=r wherein vector z is an indicator vector indicating whether a face is present in a minimum-weight surface, vector r is an indicator vector of said 2-D contour, and wherein B is an edge-face incidence matrix; and segmenting said 3-D image into distinct regions separated by the minimum-weight surface indicated by said vector z.