Generating hollow offset surface meshes from segmented CT volumes using distance fields

Abstract

We propose a method to generate hollow offset surface meshes from CT data using distance fields, in general and in the context of the 3mensio software package. Our method improves on several shortcomings of the currently implemented morphological offsetting method, like a blocky appearance of the offset surface, and uneven distance between the original surface and the offset surface. Our distance field approach is very robust, and performs consistently for a wide range of tested anatomy and across different levels of CT voxel scaling. Our new method is able to return an offset mesh from CT segmentation data in an acceptable amount of time: mostly below 20 seconds, even for very large segmentations.