Construction of volume meshes from computed tomography data.

In this paper, we present a new method, called marching volume elements (MVE), for automatically constructing a volume mesh from three-dimensional (3-D) high-resolution computed tomography (CT) data. The volume mesh generated by the MVE algorithm is suitable for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The MVE algorithm is based on the marching cubes (MC) algorithm which is a surface generation algorithm for 3-D intensity data. The mesh created with the MVE algorithm is composed of pyramids, cubes and tetrahedrons with common faces that fit together to form a topologically consistent volume. We validate the MVE algorithm on a synthetic object and demonstrate it on CT scans of a human nasal cavity.