Abstract To generate anatomical models from the Visible Human
imagery, a key first step is to trace the tissues & organs of interest
on each of many slices. This tracing has been, by and large, a manual task
so far. Our focus is to aid the human tracers by having a computer
system learn the contour being traced, and then automatically trace through
similar regions. We have integrated our research ideas into the production
tracing systems of Visible Productions, and early results demonstrate a
significant improvement in overall tracing speed, while potentially relieving
human tracers of much of the monotony in their task.
Keywords: 3D anatomical models, contour tracing, edge detection.
Acknowledgements This research is funded in part by CASI (Colorado
Advanced Software Institute) and NSF (SBIR#9761590). Our research
software was integrated into the tracing software of Visible Productions,
Inc. (of Fort Collins, CO); Dan Steward provided invaluable system
assistance. And, of course, thanks to NIH for making the Visible
Human imagery widely available.
