Reconstrucion and visualization of 3D surface model from serial-sectioned contour points

In three-dimensional accurate radiotherapy treatment planning system, one of the key steps in the whole planning is to reconstruct and visualize the surface model of tumor target and organs at risk (OAR) from a serial of cross-sectioned contour points rapidly and accurately. This study designed a fast 3D-reconstruction and visualization pipeline comprising the following four main steps: (1) pre-processing of contour points dataset; (2) extraction and simplification of Iso-surface; (3) linear transformation of surface model; (4) Smoothing the surface model. An open source Visualization Toolkit (VTK) was applied to implement this method and a friendly user interface was developed on the Visual C++ development platform. Several clinic patients' CT datasets were chosen for test data. The results show that this method could effectively avoid the “ladder effect” of standard marching cubes (MC) algorithm due to inconsistency between slice spacing and image resolution. The reconstruction surface is simplified to speed up the rendering time. Furthermore, it has been successfully integrated into domestic Accurate/Advanced Radiotherapy Treatment Planning System (ARTS) for clinical use.