<title>Intensity interpolation for branching in reconstructing three-dimensional objects from serial cross-sections</title>

Abstract

Intensity interpolation is an operation that recovers the intensity information in the gaps of serial cross sections of three-dimensional objects. It is very important in object reconstruction, especially when the reconstructed object is to be further manipulated for visualization, dissection, or slicing from arbitrary angles. One of the most difficult problems in reconstruction is how to handle the branching situations. Branching occurs where one region in one slice has multiple corresponding regions in the other slice. In this paper, a method to handle branching in intensity interpolation from serial cross sections is proposed. It consists of eight major steps: (1) partial contour to contour correspondence establishment, (2) displacement field determination, (3) intermediate contour generation, (4) interior rim generation, (5) rim correspondence establishment, (6) line segment correspondence establishment, (7) intensity determination, and (8) gap filling. As a significant extension of our previous work which performs intensity interpolation for one-to-one case, the proposed method contains a novel technique to form a displacement field which is used in generating intermediate contours (steps 1 to 3), and adapts some of the previous techniques (steps 4 to 8) to select appropriate corresponding regions for intensity interpolation.