Three-dimensional Reconstruction of Foot based on Marching Cubes

Wang Hongjian
Chongqing Engineering
Technology Research Center for
Information Management in
Development, Chongqing Technology
& Business University,
Chongqing,400067,China.
e-mail: whj_cqu@163.com

Tang Yuelin
Chongqing Special Equipment
Quality Safe Inspection Center,
Chongqing,401121,China
e-mail: tonnyue@163.com



Luo Fen
School of Computer Science &
Information Engineering, Chongqing
Technology & Business University.
Chongqing 400067,China.
e-mail: luofcn@163.com

AbstractThree-dimensional medical image reconstruction
for both transmission and emission tomography has
traditionally decomposed the problem into a set of
two-dimensional reconstructions on parallel transverse
sections. An approach for reconstructing tomographic images
based on the idea of continuous dynamical methods is
presented. The method consists of a continuous-time image
reconstruction (CIR) system described by differential
equations for solving linear inverse problems.In this paper, it
is provided to reconstruct three-dimensional(3D) models of
human body by using CT slices and digital images and
precisely finding locations of pathological formations such as
tumour. It is necessary to incise a 3D object to obtain detail
structure information inside in the process of developing 3D
medical visualization system. We design the program
reconstruct 3D images utilizing the CT slice sequence in PAT
format based on marching cubes by visual C++ 6.0 and
Visualization Toolkit (VTK) toolbox,which are used to
Cuboids that can be controlled to zoom, move or circumrotate
by mouse and used for clipping the object of 3D object. The
results supplied by the proposed algorithm are examined with
the help of some relevant examples.
KeywordsComputed tomography (CT),Three-dimensional
reconstruction; Marching Cubes; Visualization Toolkit.
I. INTRODUCTION
The rapidly changing field of medical imaging has led to
substantial efforts for developing a wide variety of imaging
techniques dedicated to body studies.The traditional
approach to three-dimensional medical image reconstruction
for both transmission and emission tomography decomposes
the problem into a set of two-dimensional reconstructions on
independent parallel sections. Each two-dimensional section
is reconstructed from a set of one-dimensional projection
data using a standard filtered backprojection algorithm[1-2].
However, while this approach is computationally efficient,
photons which pass obliquely through the chosen set of
sections cannot be included in the reconstruction. Medical
Imaging techniques are used for diagnosing and treatment of
many diseases as well as surgical operations. CT,MRI and
ultrasound imaging techniques are the mostly used ones[3].
For a long time, 3D models have being used in medical
applications in many countries, which are used just at some
high quality hospitals and medical centers. These
equipments have been indispensably for doctors diagnosis
assisted by information technology, which need strong
computers with dedicated software. It in medical imaging
remain marginal because of a number of technical and
computational difficulties. At present, such high-tech
equipments are unable to be manufactured with domestic
technology, but feasible developing supporting accessories
and software can enhance their utilization effectivity and
reduce the dependence on foreign maintenance system with
high cost. On the other hand, medical information system
does not shape clearly; medical units in national health care
system have not united yet in any standard process to
operate image diagnostic equipments or to manage patient
data. Therefore, a project making facilities for medical
information system in general and for medical imaging in
particular has been alternatively developed in order to
master mentioned technology and to develop domestic
products partially taken place of very expensive imported
facilities and soft wares[3-4].
This paper introduces our building 3D image
reconstruction software with Marching Cubes(MC)
algorithms on PC, which are very necessary tools for
medical image processing,such as foot. This method consists
of two steps, edge detection and correction.Moreover, to
develop and optimize a new imaging system, and to
recognize the influence of the various adjustable parameters,
simulation can be a helpful tool.
Figure 1. Block diagram of an energy-discriminating X-ray
computed tomography(CT) system utilizing a cadmium telluride(CdTe)
detector.MCA and PC are multi-channel analyzer and personal
computer,respectively.
2010 International Conference on Intelligent Computation Technology and Automation
978-0-7695-4077-1/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICICTA.2010.703
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Figure 2. Patterns of polygons generated Marching Cubes
Algorithm
II. FUNDAMENTAL THEORY
Figure 1 shows a block diagram of an X-ray CT system
utilizing a CdTe detector. Segmentation is the process of
classifying pixels in an image or volume. It is one of the
most difficult task in the visualization processes. For
reconstruction of medical 3D surface and volume, interest
tissue boundaries should be distinguished from others on all
the image slices. After the boundaries have been found, the
pixels, which constitute the tissue, can be assigned to a
constant grey level value. This constant value represents
only this tissue.
A. 3D reconstruction
For investigating the influence of OSAHS on human
airways, two volunteers are selected to receive the CT head
scanning. One volunteer is a 30-year-old healthy male with
normal bodyweight but no medical history of chronic upper
airway illness. The other volunteer is a 46-year-old male
who has been diagnosed OSAHS by polysomnograph
recently.
In this paper, strategy for 3D reconstruction of complex
ancient architecture is split into its component reconstruction
problem[5]. All recent medical 3D image reconstruction
techniques create 3D images from sets of 2D slices, which
can be recorded by various equipments such as CT, MRI,
ultrasound etc. Each type of scanner has his own
characteristics due to physical principles of image recording,
e.g. images of CT scanner are often parallel slices with high
contrast, images of ultrasound scanner are either parallel or
divergent slices with low contrast etc. Thus there are
different 3D reconstruction techniques for each type of data.
B. Marching Cubes
Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm is a 3D reconstruction
method developed by W. Lorensen and Cline in 1987. This
algorithm produces a triangle mesh by computing
iso-surfaces from discrete data. By connecting the patches
from all cubes on the iso-surface boundary, we get a surface
representation. Because of its merits of simple, easy to
achieve, it has been widely used, is considered as one of the
most popular algorithms for display[6-10].
The basic principle of MC algorithm are shown as
below: 1) construct iso-surface in the 3D data, 2) find the
cubes passed through iso-surface, 3) obtain the iso-surface in
cubes and calculating correlation parameters, 4) use
common software tools or graphics hardware to protract
iso-surface [11]. In medical applications, the MC algorithm
can be used in the reconstruction of the body contour or the
internal organs, so that doctors can directly observe space
relationship between interest organs and surrounding tissue
in 3D image. MC algorithm takes full advantage of the
graphics display hardware acceleration function and
produces better reconstruction image quality[11-12].
In a 3D space we enumerate 256 different situations for
the marching cubes representation. All these cases can be
generalized in 15 families by rotations and symetries (seen
Figure 2).In order to be able to determine each real case, a
notation has been adopted. It aims at refering each case by
an index created from a binary interpretation of the corner
weights. In this way, vertexes from 1 to 8 are weighted from
1 to 128 (v1 = 1, v2 = 2, v3 = 4, etc.); for example, the
family case 3 example you can see in the picture above,
corresponds to the number 5 (v1 and v3 are positive, 1 + 4 =
5).

Figure 3. Marching cubes ambiguous cases
To all this cubes we can attribute a complementary one.
Building a complementary cube consists in reversing
normals of the original cube. In the next picture you can see
some instances of cubes with their normals.
The creation of these complementary cubes allows to
give an orientation to the surface.
C. The marching cubes ambiguous cases
As for the marching squares we meet some ambiguous
marching cubes cases : for the family 4 and 10. But in 3D
space a solution has to be found because of the topology
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problems these situations create. However not only real
ambiguous cases can create topology disfunctions, some
classical families are incompatible. See for instance the next
picture[12].
To cope with these topology errors (as holes in the 3D
model), 6 families have been added to the marching cubes
cases. These families have to be used as complementary
cases[13]. For instance, in the previous picture, you have to
use the case 6c instead of the standard complementary of the
case 6(seen Fig.3).
III. PROGRAMMING
Software for reconstructing 3D image from a set of CT
images was built on Visual C++ 6.0. VTK has been chosen
because of its open source toolkit professionally designed
for computer graphics purposes, showed as fig.4.
A. Visualization Toolkit
VTK is an open source, objectoriented software system
for computer graphics, visualization, and image processing,
and visualization used by thousands of researchers and
developers around the world,which contains installer for the
Windows platform.VTK consists of a C++ class library, and
several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java,
and Python.In addition, dozens of imaging algorithms have
been directly integrated to allow the user to mix 2D imaging
or 3D graphics algorithms and data. The design and
implementation of the library has been strongly influenced
by object-oriented principles[14]. It usually has important
limitations such as low efficient code execution, poor
computing capacity [15].
B. Reconstruction of examples
1). Interface design. The main user interface of the
software is functionally similar to some commercial medical
image software. It contains a screen on the right to display
original and processing images. This screen can be displayed
with different modes. General toolbar is placed on the top
and control panel on the left. However, due to the main
educational and training purpose of the software, it contains
some more control components which are not necessary in
commercial software.
Fig.5 shows the reader of the CT images with sequences
number of 1, and 50,75,100,150 and 200, respectively.
2).Example. Through this structure, a reconstructed
triangle was stored in memory in the form of a bidirectional
linked list, which could reconstruct a 3D shape. We use MC
to reconstruction CT data of foot(556 309 223)
sequence, with gray CT images. The reconstruction of foot
showed as fig.6. The source is PAT format image to
reconstruct 3D image with techniques MPR, SR, VR with
MC algorithm. Experimental data is 256 serial images which
were transformed PAT(for Protein Analysis Toolkit) format.
The CT images are in the format of PAT, for Protein
Analysis Toolkit, is an integrated biocomputing server. PAT
is able to read and write data in many bioinformatics formats
and to create any desired pipeline by seamlessly sending the
output of a tool to the input of another tool. PAT can retrieve
protein entries from identifier-based queries by using
pre-computed database indexes[16-17].
PAT file is pattern image files which store a range of
image data and will need to viewed using the applications
that created them to be sure of viewing them correctly. The
file often used for creating a textured background.
TABLE 1. RUN TIME OF FOOT RECONSTRUCTION
part Size(pixel) frame Process time Range of gray
foot 556309 223 17297 ms 51-255
foot 556309 223 17484 ms 72-255

We use the program run in PC,which is notebook about
CPU 1.73G, Memory 1G. Harddisk 160G. the time of
reconstructing is showed in tab.1. which shows the
time-consuming of process is more than 17 seconds.
The timeGetTime() API function called by the program
retrieves the system time, in milliseconds. The system time

Figure 4. Main screen of program included foot

No.1 No.50 No.75

No.100 No.150 No.200
Figure 5. Read part of CT images
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is the time elapsed since Windows was started. It must
indicate that it need declare before use.
Note that the value returned by the timeGetTime()
function is a DWORD value. The return value wraps around
to 0 every 2^32 milliseconds, which is about 49.71 days.
This can cause problems in code that directly uses the
timeGetTime() return value in computations, particularly
where the value is used to control code execution. You
should always use the difference between two
timeGetTime() return values in computations.[18]
IV. CONCLUSION
We have presented a system for partial 3D reconstruction
based on the marching cubes algorithm. The system allows
manipulating easily all parameters involved in the process:
threshold and range parameters. The system works very well
and the 3D reconstruction is obtained in real-time.
VTK and visual c++ have powerful functions in the 3D
visualization field. Its an important tool in development
medical 3D visualization software system with marching
cubes arithmetic. After the medical image 3D
reconstruction, it is necessary to clipping 3D object to
observe the inner structure. The cuboids interactive clipping
provides an important solution. The experimental foot
results shows cuboids clipping is a convenient and flexible
approach and it can achieve real-time interactive clipping 3D
objects.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partially supported by fund of Chongqing
Science & Technology Commission under Grant
No.2006EA2011 and Chongqing Education Commission
under Grant No.Kj070708 and KJ080711,China.
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Figure 6. Result of foot reconstruction
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