Boundary detection in 3-dimensions with a medical application
Ehud Artzy, Gábor T. Herman · ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics · 1981
A graph theoretical approach is taken to solve the problem of detecting the surface of a connected subset of three-dimensional space. Motivation and application are provided by the need to display the three-dimensional appearance of internal organs of a human body based on x-rays from multiple directions. The method is implemented on a minicomputer and is illustrated by the display of the ventricular system of the human brain. In that example, the boundary detection involves selecting 10,000 surface elements out of a pool of over 1.5 million. In spite of the enormous size of the problem, the detection takes less than 30 seconds on a minicomputer.