Smooth multiple-region mesh generation for biomedical applications

The finite element method is commonly used in biomedical applications for the simulation of the behaviour of biological structures. However, extracting finite element meshes from medical data is still very challenging. In this article, an innovative system that efficiently reconstructs smooth, multi-material, 3D surface meshes from medical images is presented. Our approach is based on an enhanced Marching Tetrahedra algorithm, which extracts boundary surfaces between different materials within one sweep of the image stack in an integrated manner. Moreover,Multi-Level Partition of Unity implicit models are used to obtain a smooth and accurate surface representation of the original binary sampled surface. Mesh smoothing and decimation algorithms were also revised to adapt to the multi-material nature of the system as well as to adhere to the underlying volume data.