A Common Framework for Generating Liver Tetrahedral FEM Models from CT Slices

Generating tetrahedral meshes from CT slices is a very important step in a hepatic surgical simulation. Manual creating of these tetrahedrons is often very hard or impossible, because of hepatic geometry complexity. Therefore we have developed a common framework for generating liver tetrahedral FEM models from CT slices. This framework is consists of several steps includes liver segmentation, 3D reconstruction, mesh simplification and Delaunay triangulation. The tetrahedrons we finally get can be used for further FEM analysis. This framework could be extended to use in the other human tissue modeling with small change.