A method for segmenting a digitized medical image including providing a digitized image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points on a n-dimensional grid, modeling the segmentation phases of said image with 2.sup.k weighting functions defined as a product of k unknown auxiliary functions, minimizing an energy functional of said weighting functions and said auxiliary functions to derive k gradient flow equations for said auxiliary functions, numerically integrating said gradient flow equations wherein solutions for the k unknown auxiliary functions are obtained, and partitioning said image into segments based on a membership of each image point in each of said weighting functions.