Versatile surface model reconstruction from serial planar contours

A versatile surface model reconstruction method from serial planar contours is proposed. The method is devoted to construct human organ models for laparoscopic surgery simulation and real surgery assistance. Like many other similar-purposed methods, the proposed method tiles triangles among near contours of an organ on each two adjacent slice images, then the surface model is constructed by aggregating all tiled triangles; however, the proposed method considers more information and rules than these methods to construct more-reasonable and less-distorted models. The proposed method consists of four steps: (i) feature points on contours are first extracted to link, then partial triangles are tiled around the feature points; (ii) similar contour segments on the two near contours are extracted by a matching algorithm for tiling triangles; (iii) contours on two adjacent images are superposed, then cross points of the contours are extracted to split the remaining contour segments; (iv) at last, the proposed dynamic programming algorithm is used to construct the remaining part of the whole complete model. Comparing with other similar-purposed methods, the proposed method has the advantages: (i) more than one (cross) contour are allowed in a slice image; (ii) reasonable data structure for describing the relationship among contours on one slice image is given to help the reconstruction; (iii) the proposed method is more versatile to construct more-reasonable and less-distorted models; (iv) complicated models can be properly reconstructed.