3-D reconstruction from tomographic data using 2-D active contours

Reconstructing three-dimensional (3-D) shapes of structures like internal o rgans from tomographic data is an important problem in medical imaging. Var ious forms of the deformable surface model have been proposed to tackle it, but they are either computationally expensive or limited to tubular shapes . In this paper a 3-D reconstruction mechanism that requires only 2-D defor mations is proposed. Advantages of the proposed model include that it is co nformable to any 3-D shape, efficient, and highly parallelizable. Most impo rtantly, it requires from the user an initial 2-D contour on only one of th e tomograph slices to start with. Experimental results are shown to illustr ate the performance of the model. (C) 2000 Academic Press.