Three-dimensional solid reconstruction of a human bone from CT images using interpolation with triangular Bézier patches

We propose an approach for the three-dimensional solid reconstruction of a human bone using medical images obtained from Computed tomography (CT). CT images of the female from the Visible Korean (VK) data set, which were constructed in the VK human project, were used. First, the femur and hip bone images were segmented from the original image. The segmented images were then smoothed by a Gaussian filter, and a triangular mesh was generated using the marching-cubes algorithm. To reduce the triangles in the generated mesh and eliminate aliasing, a triangle decimation algorithm using the quadric error metric method was adopted. To reconstruct the surfaces, the triangles in the mesh were interpolated with cubic triangular Bézier patches. The patches were then converted to a solid by stitching them. Finally, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach can be used in a practical design environment by importing the reconstructed solids into a commercial computer-aided design software.