Automatic reconstruction of serial sections using the finite element method
Elizabeth Guest, Richard Baldock · Bioimaging · 1995
Serial sectioning of biological material is often the only way to reveal the 3D structure and function. In this paper we describe a fully automatic method for correcting the sectioning distortions (warping) in order to produce a smooth representative reconstruction of the original object. The basic idea is to attach springs to correspondences established between sections where each section is modelled as a thin elastic plate, constrained so that points can only move within the plane of the plate, and then to let go and wait until the system reaches equilibrium. Correspondences between sections are calculated using new image processing techniques; the finite element method is used to establish the equilibrium position. We show that the warping algorithm described here produces significant improvements over registration and that smoothing of the entire voxel image is achieved.