CONSTRUCTION OF ANATOMICALLY ACCURATE FINITE ELEMENT MODELS OF THE HUMAN HAND AND A RAT KIDNEY

The aim of the paper is to develop a method for generating three-dimensional (3D) models of organs from medical images (computerized tomography (CT) images, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), etc.). There were three main steps in the development of the model: the first step was image processing. Different image-processing operators including blurring, sharpening, edge detection, region segmentation, mathematical morphology transformation, rotation, and movement of the kidney slices were performed to automatically construct the accurate boundary information. The second step was mesh generation of each slice based on the boundary information by using the transfinite interpolation (TFI) technique. In this paper, the TFI method was improved to create grids from images directly. The last step was reconstructing the models by stacking the 2D grid models and visualizing the result in the Advanced Visual System (AVS) software. In order to verify the effectiveness of this method, the finite element (FE) models of a rat kidney, human hand, and blood vessels were reconstructed and good results were obtained.