Monday, October 3, 2011

Reaction: Marching Cubes: A High Resolution 3D surface construction algorithm

The paper discusses about the new approach to generate triangle models from 3D medical data. According to researchers there are various applications of 3D medical images, for example, to study complex bone structure. Most of the existing algorithms today introduce artifacts but authors are confident that this new algorithm generates results with high precision.

I found the process of triangulating 256 cubes to just 14 patterns, quite interesting. It seems that authors really have a novel approach for generating triangle models from CT scan, MRI etc by giving physicians 3D views of the anatomy. The algorithm uses a case table of edge intersections to describe how a surface cuts through each cube in a 3D data set.

However, I'm not quite sure about the accuracy of such algorithms, specially when we are dealing with medical data. It's quite evident that such 3D models would be quite useful for better investigations but usually CT scans and MRIs are conducted taking data from more than one plane and sometimes we do have microscopic information which may be neglected by any of these visualization algorithms.

Probably I think, if we relate volume investigations with this paper these 3D triangle models would come into role for animations. This is because as per the authors (of the other paper) animation is critical to the volume visualization process.

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