BoneSplit: A 3D Texture Painting Tool for Interactive Bone Separation in CT Images

We have developed an efficient interactive tool for segmenting individual bones and bone fragments in 3D computed tomography (CT) images. The tool BoneSplit, which is primarily intended for virtual cranio-maxillofacial (CMF) surgery planning, combines direct volume rendering with interactive 3D texture painting to enable quick identification and marking of bone structures. The user can paint markers (seeds) directly on the rendered bone surfaces as well as on individual CT slices. Separation of the marked bones is then achieved through the random walks algorithm, which is applied on a graph constructed from the thresholded bones. The segmentation runs on the GPU and can achieve close to real-time update rates for volumes as large as 512x512x512 voxels. The user can perform segmentation editing to correct the result. An evaluation reports segmentation results comparable with manual segmentations, but obtained within a few minutes.

Figure 1: BoneSplit in use.

Publication

Oral presentation at Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision - WSCG 2015.

BoneSplit - A 3D Texture Painting Tool for Interactive Bone Separation in CT Images, J. Nysjo, et al., Journal of WSCG, 23(2): 157-166, 2015.

People

• Filip Malmberg, Docent, Centre for Image Analysis
• Johan Nysjö, PhD, Centre for Image Analysis
• Ingela Nyström, Professor, Centre for Image Analysis (Director)