Dynamic elastic interpolation for 3D medical image reconstruction from serial cross sections.

An interpolation method is proposed for generating the intermediate contours between a start contour and a goal contour. Coupled with the display method for voxel-based objects, it provides a powerful tool for reconstructing the 3D object from serial cross sections. The method tries to fill in the lost information between two slices, assuming that there is smooth change between them. This is a reasonable assumption provided that the sampling is at least twice the Nyquist rate, in which case the result of the interpolation is expected to be very close to reality. One of the major advantages of this approach is its ability to handle the branching problem. Another major advantage is that after each intermediate contour is generated and sent to display device, there is no need to keep it in the memory unless the solid model will be used for further processing. Thus, the space complexity of this algorithm is relatively low.