This paper proposes an energy conduction model (ECM) based on the level set framework, which takes advantage of the heat conduction equation to construct the image energy. After comparing the image intensity distribution with the spatial distribution of the temperature field, an energy conduction function is defined, which well simulates the process of heat conducting. The advantage of the ECM is that it captures the global feature of an image and takes the local intensity information into account. Thus, ECM is able to accurately segment medical images with inhomogeneity and noise, as well as for the medical images with multi-targets. Synthetic and real medical images are tested with ECM, which shows its robustness and efficiency.