Multimaterial Meshing of MRI Head Data for Bioelectric Field Simulations

The problem of body fitting meshes that are both adaptive and geometrically accurate is important in a variety of biomedical applications in a multitude of clinical settings, including electrocardiology, neurology, and orthopedics. Adaptivity is necessary because of the combination of large-scale and smallscale structures (e.g. relatively small blood vessels spanning a human head). Geometric accuracy is important for several reasons. In some cases, such as computational fluid dynamics, the fine-scale structure of the fluid domain is important for qualitative and quantitative accuracy of the solutions. More generally, finite element approximations of elliptic problems with rough coefficients require increased spatial resolution normal to material boundaries [3]. The problem of constructing meshes from biomedical images is particularly difficult because of the complexity and irregularity of the structures, and thus tuning or correcting meshes by hand is quite difficult and time consuming. Many researchers and, indeed, commercial products simply subdivide the underlying hexahedral image grid and assign material properties to tetrahedra based on standard decomposition of each hexahedron into tetrahedra. This paper presents a small case study of the results of a recently developed method for multimaterial, tetrahedral meshing of biomedical volumes [6]. The method uses an iterative relaxation of surface point point positions that are constrained to subsets of the volume that correspond to boundaries between different materials. In this paper we briefly review the method and present results on a set of MRI head images for use in bioelectric field simulation and source localization.