An image-based and layer-arranged mesh generator for the simulations of bio-medical structures

ABSTRACT Although the mesh generation technology is mature currently, for some special cases, the mesh arranged in layer-by-layer way is still needed. For example, as the 3D printing process generates parts in a layer-by-layer way, the analysis model for simulating the printing process should also be layer-by-layer arranged to simulate the layer-by-layer additive printing to match the real behavior. For bio-medical structural problems, the medical structures are often obtained by CT scan which generates many slices of images. With those sliced images, the 3D structures of the medical objects can be generated. In this case, all slices of the scan images are in layer-based format. For these applications, if the analysis models are also layer-by-layer arranged, they will fit the arrangement of the source data and become more suitable to do simulation. Moreover, since the sliced CT scan images include the mineral bone density (BMD) data by gray-scale, which is proportionally related to the bone’s stiffness. From the scanned images, the stiffness of each position can also be obtained. However, the layer-based image’s data is in layer-by-layer sense, unless the finite element mesh is also arranged in the same way, layer by layer, the gray-scale data cannot be used. This study proposes a mesh generation method, which is layer-arranged and based on the scanned image data derived from CT scan, to generate the analysis models which can represent not only the irregular shape but also the randomly distributed BMD data, and can be used to do the simulations for bio-medical structures.