AUTOMATIC 3 D FINITE ELEMENT MESH GENERATION : DATA FITTING FROM AN ATLAS

Finite Element (FE) analysis starts to be largely used in the field of computer assisted surgery, from bones model in orthopaedic surgery to facial tissues modelling in craniofacial surgery. In those frameworks, models have to be rebuilt and adapted to each patient, which means the use of automatic 3D mesh generators. In practice, to maintain a strong patient-oriented specificity, such automatic generators often make some compromises in terms of homogeneity, symmetry or mesh refinement. For those reasons, a new mesh generating technique, namely the Mesh-Matching algorithm, has been introduced. Five steps need to be driven to generate a patient FE model: (1) the atlas generation, (2) the segmentation of the patient data, (3) the automatic computation (following a matching process) of the transformation T between the atlas and the patient data, (4) the application of T to the atlas to generate a patient mesh and (5) the regularization of the patient mesh to allow FE analysis. This paper presents a first evaluation of the Mesh Matching algorithm, validated on femur and face 3D FE meshes.