Patient-specific anatomic models: Geometric surface generation from three-dimensional medical images using a specified polygonal budget

Virtual reality offers the promise of highly interactive, natural control of the visualization process, greatly enhancing the scientific value of the data produced by medical imaging systems. Due to the computational and real time update requirements of virtual reality interfaces, however, the complexity of polygonal surfaces which can be displayed is limited. In this paper, we present a novel method for the production of a polygonal surface containing a pre-specified number of polygons from volumetric data. To preserve surface detail, we extract a set of curvature weights from the volumetric data and use these weights as the input vectors to a 2-D Kohonen network. The adaptation of the network to the input vectors results in a display surface that preserves useful detail relative to the number of polygons used.