PROTOTYPE AUTOMATIC SYSTEM FOR CONSTRUCTING 3D INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR IMAGE OF BIOLOGICAL OBJECTS

Ultrasonic and magnetic resonance imaging systems are used to visualize the interior states of biological objects. These nondestructive methods have many advantages but too much expensive. And they do not give exact color information and may miss some details. If it is allowed to destruct some biological objects to get the interior and exterior information, constructing 3D image from the series of the sliced sectional images gives more useful information with relatively low cost. In this paper, PC based automatic 3D model generator was developed. The system was composed of three modules. One is the object handling and image acquisition module, which feeds and slices objects sequentially and maintains the paraffin cool to be in solid state and captures the sectional image consecutively. The second is the system control and interface module, which controls actuators for feeding, slicing, and image capturing. And the last is the image processing and visualization module, which processes a series of acquired sectional images and generates 3D graphic model. The handling module was composed of the gripper, which grasps and feeds the object and the cutting device, which cuts the object by moving cutting edge forward and backward. Sliced sectional images were acquired and saved in the form of bitmap file. The 3D model was generated to obtain the volumetric information using these 2D sectional image files after being segmented from the background paraffin. Once 3-D model was constructed on the computer, user could manipulate it with various transformation methods such as translation, rotation, scaling including arbitrary sectional view.