An Improved Growing Deformable Surface Patches Model for Analysis of Medical Images

An improved growing deformable surface patches algorithm and its application in medical image analysis are presented in this work. In this proposed method, a growing mechanism is introduced to 3D deformable model. After a surface patch is initialized within the external force field, it is deformed to reach and stop at the boundary of the object and anchored there. New surface patches are initialized based on the existing anchored patch for deformation in the subsequent deformation iterations. This process is repeated until a closed out surface of the object is obtained. With the growing framework, the proposed deformable model could achieve topology adaptive surface extraction by connecting new surface patches with active patches and automated triangulating the square patch in particular situations. Further more, surface curvature adaptiveness is achieved in the proposed deformable model by associating the surface curvature with the size of the surface patches.