[vtkusers] DICOM to Model Mesh

[Miro Drahos]

This is basically a segmentation problem, which in general is a 
difficult problem.
One such pipeline could be as follows:
1.) image preprocessing (cropping, smoothing, etc).
2.) thresholding to get a filled binary mask of your object (vertebra)
3.) running Marching Cubes to get a mesh.

This is a very crude and basic approach, but something to get you 
started. Note that marching cubes might give you a mesh with topological 
defects (holes, handles), from the noise in your data.

There are a variety of other sophisticated algorithms, e.g. using 
statistical methods if you have some already segmented data (like 
creating a mean shape from the previously segmented data, and using PCA 
to do shape analysis, or some machine learning approach).

Another approach would be to use deformable models, i.e. define forces 
that would (iteratively) drive an initial mesh to fit the image. The 
forces would be based on image intensity, gradient and/or laplacian, and 
internal forces to keep the mesh regular and relatively smooth.

There is a lot that has been done in this domain, so look at some 
articles on segmentation.

HTH,
Miro


On 11/25/2013 06:20 AM, Boogiedoll wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to ask the experts about common way in vtk to create a spine bone (e.g L1) mesh from a CT DICOM stack, including the pre-processing.
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Harold
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