Shrinking tube mesh: combined mesh generation and smoothing for pathologic vessels

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• histology
• intracranial aneurysm
• mesh generation