Comparing Techniques for Tetrahedral Mesh Generation

The growing importance of subject-specific modeling and simulation in medical applications has increased the need for automatic techniques for creating high-quality meshes directly from medical data. We discuss the main aspects related to volumetric mesh generation from iso-surfaces. We take a practical approach, and the main focus of this paper is evaluating processing pipelines using widely available tools. In our processing pipelines, we are trying to evaluate both the surface mesh and tetrahedral mesh quality, and their interactions. For the iso-surface extraction, we explore a number of widely available tools, in particular, Afront[15], CGAL[2], Macet[5], Dual Contouring[9] and Marching Cubes[11]. For tetrahedral mesh generation, we explore using TetGen[16], NetGen[13] and CAMAL[3]. We use VisTrails [1], a provenance-enabled workflow system, for assembling the processing pipelines, and comparing the results. Our plan is to make our processing pipelines available for the community, so that our results can be fully reproduced by others. In fact, our hope is that the comparison methodology used here makes it easier for others to build and compare alternative processing pipelines.