Optimal Medial Surface Generation for Anatomical Volume Representations

Medial representations are a widely used technique in abdominal organ shape representation and parametrization. Those methods require good medial manifolds as a starting point. Any medial surface used to parameterize a volume should be simple enough to allow an easy manipulation and complete enough to allow an accurate reconstruction of the volume. Obtaining good quality medial surfaces is still a problem with current iterative thinning methods. This forces the usage of generic, pre-calculated medial templates that are adapted to the final shape at the cost of a drop in volume reconstruction. This paper describes an operator for generation of medial structures that generates clean and complete manifolds well suited for their further use in medial representations of abdominal organ volumes. While being simpler than thinning surfaces, experiments show its high performance in volume reconstruction and preservation of medial surface main branching topology.