Interactive Mesh Smoothing for Medical Applications

Surface models derived from medical image data often exhibit artefacts, such as noise and staircases, which can be reduced by applying mesh smoothing filters. Usually, an iterative adaption of smoothing parameters to the specific data and continuous re-evaluation of accuracy and curvature is required. Depending on the number of vertices and the filter algorithm, computation time may vary strongly and interfere with an interactive mesh generation procedure. In this paper, we present an approach to improve the handling of mesh smoothing filters. Based on a GPU mesh smoothing implementation of uniform and anisotropic filters, model quality is evaluated in real-time and provided to the user to support the mental optimization of input parameters. This is achieved by means of quality graphs and quality bars. Moreover, this framework is used to find appropriate smoothing parameters automatically and to provide data-specific parameter suggestions. These suggestions are employed to generate a preview gallery with different smoothing suggestions. The preview functionality is additionally used for the inspection of specific artefacts and their possible reduction with different parameter sets.