1. A method performed in a computer system comprising the steps of: receiving as an input a digital representation of an image of a volume region of a patient's body containing the spine; using at least one of statistical and heuristic computational techniques on the digital representation, isolating the spine from the surrounding volume, and in the spine, segmenting the vertebral body trabecular bones, the vertebral body cortexes, and the intervertebral discs, and locating the planes of the intervertebral discs; wherein segmenting the intervertebral discs includes steps (i) and (ii): (i) positioning a rectangular parametric curve along the expected center of a vertebral body; and (ii) inspecting a cross section of the parametric curve; and creating a graph of weight as a function of position along the spine; and generating a map corresponding to the volume containing plural elements wherein each element is identified as background or as part of a specified part of the spine.