Region-based geometric modeling of human airways and arterial vessels

Accurate geometric models of human airways and arterial vessels play a critical role in the analysis of air and blood flows in human bodies. The generic geometric modeling methods become invalid when the model consists of bronchioles and very small vessels. This paper presents a new region-based method to reconstruct the airway tree and arterial vessels from point clouds obtained from CT or MR images. A novel layer-by-layer searching algorithm is developed to identify the bifurcation points and branches in the airway tree. The surface patches on each branch are constructed according to the number of points on the branch other than by applying a single tolerance for the entire reconstruction process regardless of the number of elemental points. The distortion problem occurred at small bronchus and vessels are thus solved.