Tetrahedral Image-to-Mesh Conversion Approaches for Surgery Simulation and Navigation

In this paper we evaluate three different mesh generation approaches with respect to their fitness for use in a surgery simulation and navigation system. The behavior of such a system can be thought of as a trade-off between material fidelity and computation time. We focus on one critical component of this system, namely non-rigid registration, and conduct an experimental study of the selected mesh generation approaches with respect to material fidelity of the resulting meshes, shape of mesh elements, condition number of the resulting stiffness matrix, and the registration error. We concluded that meshes with very bad fidelity do not affect the accuracy drastically. On the contrary, meshes with very good fidelity hurt the speed of the mesher due to the poor quality they exhibit. We also observed that the speed of the solver is very sensitive to mesh quality rather than to fidelity. For these reasons, we think that mesh generation should first try to produce high quality meshes, possibly sacrificing fidelity.

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