Learning-based 3D surface optimization from medical image reconstruction

Mesh optimization has been studied from the graphical point of view: It often focuses on 3D surfaces obtained by optical and laser scanners. This is despite the fact that isosurfaced meshes of medical image reconstruction suffer from both staircases and noise: Isotropic filters lead to shape distortion, while anisotropic ones maintain pseudo-features. We present a data-driven method for automatically removing these medical artifacts while not introducing additional ones. We consider mesh optimization as a combination of vertex filtering and facet filtering in two stages: Offline training and runtime optimization. In specific, we first detect staircases based on the scanning direction of CT/MRI scanners, and design a staircase-sensitive Laplacian filter (vertex-based) to remove them; and then design a unilateral filtered facet normal descriptor (uFND) for measuring the geometry features around each facet of a given mesh, and learn the regression functions from a set of medical meshes and their high-resolution reference counterparts for mapping the uFNDs to the facet normals of the reference meshes (facet-based). At runtime, we first perform staircase-sensitive Laplacian filter on an input MC (Marching Cubes) mesh, and then filter the mesh facet normal field using the learned regression functions, and finally deform it to match the new normal field for obtaining a compact approximation of the high-resolution reference model. Tests show that our algorithm achieves higher quality results than previous approaches regarding surface smoothness and surface accuracy. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.