Vertebrae CT Images 3D Reconstruction with Improve Marching Cubes Algorithm

Medical images 3D reconstruction is an important part in medical image analysis and processing. Although lots of algorithms have been proposed continuously, speed and accuracy cannot conform to actual needs, which has always been the focus topic. In this paper, we propose an Improved Marching Cubes algorithm (I-MC) based on the surface rendering theory, which implements 3D reconstruction of the vertebrae. Firstly, we preprocessed the original 2D vertebrae CT images with the bilateral-filter denoising algorithm. Secondly, on the basis of the traditional Marching Cubes algorithm, the seed voxels were extracted and the Region Growing algorithm was used to determine all voxels that contain isosurfaces. Then, the Golden Section instead of the traditional linear interpolation was used to calculate the equivalent point, and this method reduced the calculations of public edges. VTK and OpenGL implemented 3D reconstruction of the vertebrae on GPU quickly and accurately. The experimental results show that when compared with the traditional Marching Cubes algorithm and Mesh Simplification Marching Cubes algorithm, the improved algorithm achieves a significant improvement of reconstruction speed while preserving the accurate results. The efficiency of algorithm is improved dramatically. This method is real-time and achieves the goal of efficient 3D reconstruction of vertebrae CT images.