1. A method of segmenting a digitized medical image comprising the steps of: 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 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.