Adaptive Surface Mesh Reconstruction for Computed Tomography Images

Abstract

In medical applications, it is important to reconstruct surface meshes from Computed Tomography (CT) images. Surface mesh reconstruction of biological tissues actually suffers from staircase artifacts, due to anisotropic CT data. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive surface mesh reconstruction method. We convert the contour pixels of medical image to contour points and exploit the adaptive spherical cover to produce an approximating surface based on the contour points. Due to the reconstruction quality depending on the accurate normal estimation, computing the normal vectors from the negative gradient based on 3D binary volume data instead of classical principal component analysis (PCA), and then covering contour points by adaptive spheres, linking the auxiliary points in the spheres for reconstructing adaptive triangular meshes. The presented method has been used in CT images of the first cervical vertebrae (C1), scapula, as well as the third lumbar vertebrae (L3) and the results are analyzed regarding their smoothness, accuracy and mesh quality. The results show that our method can reconstruct smooth, accurate and high-quality adaptive surface meshes.