Interactive Modelling of Volumetric Musculoskeletal Anatomy

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive volumetric approach for musculoskeletal modeling that enables intuitive control, automatic tissue intersection handling, and conversion to geometric representations, enhancing anatomical visualization and analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel volumetric segmentation method with interactive tools for muscle and skeleton modeling, improving flexibility and automation over traditional shape-based techniques.

Findings

Automated handling of tissue intersections during modeling

Interactive muscle and skeleton editing tools

Conversion algorithms for volumetric to geometric representations

Abstract

We present a new approach for modelling musculoskeletal anatomy. Unlike previous methods, we do not model individual muscle shapes as geometric primitives (polygonal meshes, NURBS etc.). Instead, we adopt a volumetric segmentation approach where every point in our volume is assigned to a muscle, fat, or bone tissue. We provide an interactive modelling tool where the user controls the segmentation via muscle curves and we visualize the muscle shapes using volumetric rendering. Muscle curves enable intuitive yet powerful control over the muscle shapes. This representation allows us to automatically handle intersections between different tissues (musclemuscle, muscle-bone, and muscle-skin) during the modelling and automates computation of muscle fiber fields. We further introduce a novel algorithm for converting the volumetric muscle representation into tetrahedral or surface geometry for use in downstream tasks. Additionally, we introduce an interactive skeleton authoring tool that allows the users to create skeletal anatomy starting from only a skin mesh using a library of bone parts.