This paper describes the use of heuristics in the determination of a minimum cost path between two points in digital images. The application of four different search methods when applied in two and three-dimensional digital images is presented and evaluated. Experiments show that the number of nodes that are being addressed in the search process strongly depends on the discriminative power of the feature used. Furthermore, it is shown that for a specific application, the use of a simple heuristic function leads to a considerable reduction in the number of evaluated nodes as compared with the traditional unidirectional approach.