MeshMed 2012 - 2012 International Workshop on Mesh Processing in Medical Image Analysis

Many strategies for medical image analysis have been built on an image analysis pipeline that starts with acquired image data, performs filtering and processing, constructs geometric models of important surfaces and structures, performs simulation, and finally provides quantitative and visual analysis of the data. Within this pipeline, geometry and shape are commonly represented as a mesh, or a discretization of some domain into simpler computational elements such as quads or triangles (representative of surface pieces) or tetrahedra and hexahedra (representative of volumetric elements). This image-to-mesh (I2M) step converts volumetric images into formats that are more suitable for solving finite-element simulations, analyzing critical structures, and performing boundary surface visualization tasks. Current research in computational geometry, graphics hardware, and computer graphics has produced methods to represent, extract, refine, visualize and analyze both critical surfaces embedded in the 3D volumes, such as interfaces between tissues, as well as volumetric regions, such as organs.
The workshop investigates the role meshes have with medical image analysis and is broadly based on three overlapping themes:
Mesh processing,The I2M pipeline,Surface analysis and extraction.
While numerous I2M technologies have been developed, rarely do they get sufficient exposure so that out-of-field researchers have the necessary expertise to know the nuances between them. Similarly, researchers in geometry, meshing, and surfacing often consider their problems in independent settings, external to their use in a particular pipeline. In particular, there is a need for designing novel technologies that strictly focus on medical image domains. This workshop proposes to improve the cross-pollination of the imaging and meshing efforts by considering how meshing fits into the end-to-end pipeline from image acquisition to clinical analysis.