Qualitative analysis of two reconstruction techniques and their application in dentistry

Although visualization in the field of dentistry has some of the same requi rements as the medicine field, the differences in goal demand specific appr oaches. This paper reports on the implementation of two fundamentally diffe rent approaches to reconstruction of structures from planar cross sections and their application to dentistry data. One of the approaches was an imple mentation of a distance-based sampling technique, and the other is a new al gorithm, based on the Delaunay triangulation. Both were tested using contou r data of teeth and the results are compared here in the light of the targe t applications, which are teaching and training dentistry, as well as simul ation of dental procedures and illnesses, Widely mentioned problems encount ered in local reconstruction methods such as marching cubes for these cases ate clearly illustrated in this paper, and a very satisfactory alternative is given. (C) 2000 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(00)01504-X].