Surface Modeling With Medical Imagery

3D biomedical data obtained through tomography provide exceptional views of the interior structure of biological material. While visualization is one of the primary purposes for obtaining these data, other more quantitative and analytic uses are possible. These include modeling of tissue properties and interrelationships, simulation of physical processes, interactive surgical investigation, and analysis of dynamics. In large part these uses require the representation of tissue geometry, and this suggests the use of descriptive formalisms that make this geometric structure explicit. The descriptive formalism we are developing models tissue imaged from tomography as two-dimensional manifolds in three space. The uses demonstrated here include simple versions of surgical simulation, kinematic modeling, and kinematic analysis.