Fast smoothing of superficial respiratory artifacts on medical surfaces

Respiratory artifacts appear very often in medical volumes when the subject under examination is in free respiration conditions. Such artifacts cause a severe deformation to the external body anatomy and are visible and enhanced during the 3D reconstruction of the patient surface. We present a dedicated approach for suppressing the respiratory artifacts on planar body contours. The proposed technique leads to an efficient mechanism, which enables the qualitative and quantitative improvement of the respiratory waves on the final reconstructed mesh while preventing the original anatomical features of the body. We show examples and statistical measurements, which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach for different CT cases.