Due to weak edges and low contrast areas in digital images, such as a left ventricle in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images, a deformation curve may leak from the outer boundary when images are segmented using the traditional snake model. An improved algorithm based on the water balloons snake model is introduced to solve this problem. Firstly, the barycenter and the boundary shape area of the left ventricle in a digital MRI image are obtained through mathematical morphology. The left ventricular watershed line is obtained next using a watershed transform algorithm, which is taken as the initial deformation curve in a balloon snake model to capture the contour. Different snake models are tested to digitallytagged MRI images of left ventricles of small pigs. Contrast results indicate that the water balloons snake model can solve the leakage problem in traditional snake and balloon snake models. In addition, the processing speed is improved significantly.