Reconstruction of High Resolution 3D Meshes of Lung Geometry from HRCT Contours
Ramakrishnan Mukundan · 2016
High Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) images of the lungs contain a huge amount of geometrical information that could be effectively extracted to construct a mesh surface of the underlying geometry to a high level of detail. In this paper, we consider this as a problem of constructing 3D surfaces from contours of axial slices. While many reconstruction algorithms adopt volumetric approaches and ray casting methods, we propose a novel algorithm for automatic segmentation of large volume sets, and a contour-based construction of a three-dimensional mesh representation that may be easily used in any rendering application or combined with larger meshes of anatomical parts. Several acceleration structures to reduce the complexity of the algorithm are also presented. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a high level of detail and quality of rendering that may find useful applications in the field of visualization and graphics.