High quality surface mesh generation for multi-physics bio-medical simulations

Abstract

Manual surface reconstruction is still an everyday practice in applications involving complex irregular domains, necessary for modeling biological systems. Rapid development of biomedical imaging and simulation, however, requires automatic computations involving frequent re-meshing of (r)evolving domains that human-driven generation can simply no longer deliver. This bottleneck hinders the development of many applications of high social importance, like computational physiology or computer aided medicine. While many commercial packages offer mesh generation options, these depend on high quality input, which is rarely available when depending on image segmentation results. We propose a simple approach to automatically recover a high quality surface mesh from low-quality, oversampled and possibly non-consistent inputs that are often obtained via 3-D acquisition systems. As opposed to the majority of the established meshing techniques, our procedure is easy to implement and very robust against damaged or partially incomplete, inconsistent or discontinuous inputs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.