Generation and adaptation of computational surface meshes from discrete anatomical data

Fast and accurate scanning devices are nowadays widely used in many engineering and biomedical fields. The resulting discrete data is usually directly converted into polygonal surface meshes, using 'brute-force' algorithms, often resulting in meshes that may contain several millions of polygons. Simplification is therefore required in order to make storage, computation and display possible if not efficient. In this paper, we present a general scheme for mesh simplification and optimization that allows to control the geometric approximation as well as the element shape and size quality (required for numerical simulations). Several examples ranging from academic to complex biomedical geometries (organs) are presented to illustrate the efficiency and the utility of the proposed approach. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.