Using 2D active contour models for 3D reconstruction from serial sections

Reconstructing the 3D boundary of a structure from tomographic data is an important problem in medical imaging. Various forms of the active surface model have been proposed to tackle it, but they are either computationally expensive or requiring extensive guidance from the user. We propose an active model that is conformable to any 3D shape, easy to use, efficient, and is highly parallelizable. It requires only an initial contour on one of the tomographs to start with. The essential idea is to break down the highly interconnected 3D deformation system into 2D pieces that work independently to save computations, and that deform in all directions to wrap around noise spots while conforming to the structure's shape.