Active surface modeling at CT resolution limits with micro CT ground truth

B-spline active surfaces have been extensively utilized to perform automated feature extraction in medical imaging. In this study we focus our attention on the accuracy of 3D B-spline active surface modeling of very small objects. In particular we investigate different smoothing conditions, based upon the regularization of L1 and L2 norms of surface curvature. The model accuracy is directly determined by ground truth through the use of micro CT, allowing the analysis of real data instead of synthetic data. This study highlights the detrimental effect that results from expansive terms in the energy equation such as the L2 norm and the importance of the point spread function in reconstruction problems where the objects are comparable in size to the resolution of the imaging system.