Search

In contrast to unstructured meshes, structured meshes yield faster simulation results for bio-medical simulations, but are very time-consuming to create. A preprocessing step in the generation of structured meshes is the manual construction of a blockstructure approximating the vessel. Here, we present an automatic centerline calculation and blockstructure generation to reduce the user effort and time of structured mesh generation. The centerline is detected as points in between opposite faces. Based on the centerline, cross sections are determined and a blockstructure which approximates the vessel is automatically generated. The centerline detection does not require time-consuming user input and meshes with more than 195,000 vertices are processed in less than 160 seconds. The results of the presented automatic centerline detection are compared to a centerline with manual input generated by the widely used vmtk tool. The centerlines are similar, small differences occur at bifurcation and at the aneurysm.

We present a tool for automatic segmentation of wall enhancement of intracranial aneurysms in black blood MRI. The results of the automatic segmentation with several configurations is compared to manual expert segmentations. While the manual segmentation includes some voxels of lower intensity not present in the automatic segmentation, overall the volume of the automatic segmentation is higher.

We present a mesh generation algorithm which is able to produce smooth meshes from point clouds derived from histological slices. In this work, the shrinking tube mesh generation is used on histologic images depicting pathologic vessels. Our mesh generation is modeled after the behaviour of a shrinking tube. A start shape is fitted iteratively to the point cloud. The presented algorithm was successfully used to generate meshes of the inner and outer contour from vessels in histologic images. While histologic slices have a high in-plane resolution, the large slice distance and deformations during tissue deformations are challenging for 3D model generation.