Topological refinement of volumetric data
David W. Shattuck, Richard M. Leahy · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
We present a method for enforcing a topological constraint, homeomorphism to a sphere, on a set of volumetric data. A graph-based topological representation is created from voxel connectivity within the volume and automatically edited to have the desired topology. The volume is forced to match this structure, resulting in a topologically spherical surface. The method is fully automated and has the advantage of operating on the volume data prior to tessellation, significantly reducing computational costs compared to mesh- based methods. We demonstrate the method on a simple test volume and on the surface of a cerebral cortex obtained from a magnetic resonance image volume.