Surface Reconstruction and Geometric Modeling for Digital Prosthesis Design

The restoration and recovery of a defective skull can be performed through operative techniques to implant a customized prosthesis. Recently, image processing, surface reconstruction and geometric methods have been used for digital prosthesis design. In this chapter we review state-of-the-art approaches in this field and discuss related issues. The field of prosthesis modeling may include methods for segmentation and surface reconstruction, geometric modeling, multiscale methods and user interaction approaches. So, we present the background in the area by reviewing methods in isosurface extraction from 3D images, deformable models, wavelets and subdivision surfaces. Then, we discuss some proposals in this area: a balloon model for slice-by-slice bone reconstruction, the T-Surfaces plus isosurface generation models as a general framework for surface reconstruction and user interaction, wavelets-based multiscale methods and filling holes methods. We describe also experimental results and a computational tool that we are developing for image processing and visualization which can be used for digital prosthesis design. We offer a discussion by presenting some perspectives and issues related to the models described on previous sections. Finally, we present the conclusions of our work.