Integrated interactive system for three-dimensional segmentation and reconstruction from multiple modalities

Accurate 3-dimensional segmentation and volume reconstruction of scanned data sets are the subjects of a great deal of ongoing computer science and medical research. The current trend is away from simple surface reconstruction and towards having both internal and external reconstructions of the structures of soft tissue, such as the grey and white matter of the brain. Being able accurately to threshold and segment structures such as these have additional benefits in that surface area and volume measurements can be obtained during the process of reconstruction. Measures such as these enable the tracking of physical properties, such as tumor size over the duration of the disease. The primitive for the representation of the interior of these objects is a tetrahedron. Tetrahedral geometries are readily convertible into finite element (FE) or computational fluid dynamic (CFD) meshes. The methodology and software modules are not proprietary and with a moderate amount of experience satisfactory results can be obtained. The key concepts are accurate multi-resolution thresholding, image editing capability, grid simplification for importing into the alpha-shape modeler, and accurate boundary classification.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.