Volumetric Meshes for Real-Time Medical Simulations

We present an approach to generating volumetric meshes from closed triangulated surface meshes. The approach initially generates a structured hexahedral mesh based on the bounding box of a surface. Each hexahedron is represented by five tetrahedrons. The complexity of the initial tetrahedral mesh is user-defined. In a second step various subdivision methods can be optionally applied to the tetrahedral mesh. These subdivision steps can adjust the number of tetrahedra and the quality of their aspect ratio. Additionally, they can adapt the accuracy of the correspondence of the boundary of the volumetric mesh with the given surface mesh. A third step removes tetrahedra which are outside the object. And a fourth step optimizes point positions of the resulting volumetric mesh with respect to the aspect ratio of tetrahedra. The approach has been applied to a variety of medical surface meshes. It is intended to use the generated volume meshes in medical applications, such as real-time simulation for stent placement and for hysteroscopy.