A Practical Surface Reconstruction Algorithm for Very Large Medical Datasets

In this paper a practical surface reconstruction algorithm is proposed to efficiently process very large medical dataset in general PC. By considering the conflict between memory consumption and traversal speed, we restrict the traditional surface tracking in single layer and thus get a better trade-off between them. We also use a compression scheme to store the generated mesh, which decrease the memory requirement considerably. For efficient rendering, we employ a triangle strips generation algorithm to decode directly the com-pressed mesh into triangle strip. The experimental results tested on visible man fresh CT dataset show that the proposed algorithm is very efficient in both extracting and rendering phase.