Segmenting 3D shapes out of thick "lines"

I am looking for a method that looks for shapes in 3D image in matlab. I don't have a real 3D sample image right now; in fact, my 3D image is actually a set of quantized 2D images.

The figure below is what I am trying to accomplish:

Although the example figure above is a 2D image, please understand that I am trying to do this in 3D. The input shape has these "tentacles", and I have to look for irregular shapes among them. The size of the tentacle from one point to another can change around but at "consistent and smooth" pace - that is it can be big at first, then gradually smaller later. But if suddenly, the shape just gets bigger not so gradually, like the re开发者_StackOverflow社区d bottom right area in the figure above, then this is one of the volume of interests. Note that these shapes have more tendency to be rounded and spherical, but some of them are completely arbitrary and random.

I've tried the following methods so far:

1. Erode n times and dilate n times: given that the "tentacles" are always smaller than the volume of interest, this method will work as long as the volume is not too small. And, we need to have a mechanism to deal with thicker portion of the tentacle that becomes false positive somehow.

2. Hough Transform: although I have been suggested this method earlier (from Segmenting circle-like shapes out of Binary Image), I see that it works for some of the more rounded shape cases, but at the same time, more difficult cases such that of less-rounded, distorted, and/or arbitrary shapes can slip through this method.

3. Isosurface: because of my input is a set of 2D quantized images, using an isosurface allow me to reconstruct image in 3D and see things clearer. However, I'm not sure what could be done further in this case.

So can anyone suggests some other techniques for segmenting such shape out of these "tentacles"?

Every point on your image has the property that it is either part of the tentacle, or part of the volume of interest. If it is unknown apriori what the expected girth of the tentacle is, then 1 wont work because we won't be able to set n. However, we know that the n that erases the tentacle is smaller than the n that erases the node. You can for each point replace it with an integer representing the distance to the edge. Effectively, this can be done via successive single pixel erosion, and replacing each pixel with the count of the iteration at which it was erased. Lets call this the thickness at the pixel, but my rusty old mind tells me that there was a term of art for this.

Now we want to search for regions that have a higher-than-typical morphological distance from the boundary. I would do this by first skeletonizing the image (http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/images/ref/bwmorph.html) and then searching for local maxima of the thickness along the skeleton. These are points on the skeleton where the thickness is larger than the neighbor points.

Finally I would sort the local maxima by the thickness, a threshold on which should help to separate the volumes of interest from the false positives.