Three-dimensional CAD model reconstruction from image data of computer tomography

Three-dimensional (3D) shape reconstruction from 2D image data has been receiving extensive attention in medical engineering. It can enhance accurate diagnosis of the disease from medical images of computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). An algorithm based on reverse engineering technique was proposed in this work for 3D surface reconstruction of CT images. Several image processing techniques were applied first to detect the 2D contour of the object for each of the CT images. A surface lofting approach was then employed to fit the 2D contours into a 3D surface model. A brain example was presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.