A Simple and Optimal Energy Surface Reconstruction Algorithm from Volumetric Data

We describe a new method for building 3D surface meshes from volumetricimages, as are created in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The method works
by first extracting the contours from the MRI data, and then using modified
polygon boolean operations to find difference polygons. The last step is
performed by applying a Constrained Delauny Triangulation (CDT) algorithm to
build a surface mesh. Since it is based on CDT, the mesh quality is usually
very good. Moreover, the resulting triangular surface mesh is the optimal
one for surface interpolation. In case of undersampled images, the mesh
quality can be improved dramatically by inserting new Steiner points in to
the mesh. Thus the mesh can be made suitable for use in scientific
computation. Our method has the advantages of combining the generation and
optimization of the mesh in one step compared with other methods. These advantages are illustrated.
Also UMIACS-TR-2003-11