Growing-cube isosurface extraction algorithm for medical volume data

In medical applications, three-dimensional volume data such as CT and MRI are gathered from medical-imaging devices. Marching cube (MC) algorithm is a common routine to extract isosurfaces from volume data. The MC algorithm generates the massive number of triangles to represent an isosurface. It is difficult to render this amount of triangles in real-time on general workstations. In this paper, we present a growing-cube algorithm to reduce the number of triangles generated by the MC algorithm. Growing-cube algorithm uses a surface tracker to avoid exhaustive searching isosurfaces cell-by-cell and, therefore, it saves computation time. During surface tracking, the growing-cube algorithm adaptively merges surfaces contained in the tracked cells to reduce the number of triangles. Surfaces are merged as long as the error is within user-specified error thresholds. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can generate a variable resolution of isosurfaces according to these error parameters.