1. A method of generating a gray value model associated with an anatomic entity in a digital medical image comprising the steps of sampling a manually segmented outline of said anatomic entity at a number of landmark points; sampling a number of points in a neighborhood of each of said landmark points; for each landmark point arranging sampled points in a neighborhood around a landmark point in a profile; computing at least one feature image; computing a mean profile for each landmark point and for each feature image; computing a covariance matrix of the profiles for each landmark point and each feature image; identifying an ensemble of said mean profile and covariance matrix for all feature images and all landmark points as gray value model of said anatomic entity, wherein a feature image is an image representation comprising mathematical moments of the local histogram of said image or derivative image in a window with width a around the location of a landmark.