Three dimension reconstruction of medical images based on an improved Marching Cubes algorithm

Abstract

Three dimension (3D) reconstruction of medical images is widely applied to clinical diagnosis and treatment. The Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm is a well-known surface rendering method. However, the standard MC visits all cubes including active and non-active cubes by sequential traversal in the process of the isosurface extraction from scalar volumetric data sets, which is time consuming and inefficient. In this study, combining the seeded region growing and the standard MC algorithm, an improved MC algorithm is proposed to reconstruct encephalic tissue and nasopharynx using Visualization Toolkit (VTK). The main idea of the new algorithm is to avoid the computation of non-active cubes. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the improved MC algorithm accelerates the 3D reconstruction of medical images and removes the noise from the segmentation stage. Moreover, normal calculation and mesh smoothing are investigated to improve the rendering effect.