Anatomical object volumes from deformable B-spline surface models

Accurate delineation of anatomical objects in 3D volumetric data is a significant problem in medical imaging. The authors have built a system that takes as input a spatial stack of 2D image slices being studied. The output of the system is a smooth 3D surface delineating the medical structure of interest, and the volume enclosed by the 3D surface. This paper presents a new method to represent a 3D anatomical object by a deformable B-spline tube, that facilitates the calculation of the volume enclosed based on a closed-form volume calculation formula. In order to validate the deformable B-spline surface fitting and associated volume calculation, 19 simulated 3D images were considered and theoretical volumes were compared with volumes produced by the authors´ system. The errors were less than 4.9%