Development of Automatic System for 3D Visualization of Biological Objects

Nondestructive methods such as ultrasonic and magnetic resonance imaging systems have many advantages but still 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 interior and exterior informations, constructing 3D image form a series of slices sectional images gives more useful information with relatively low cost. In this paper, a PC based automatic 3D model generator was developed. The system was composed of three modules. The first module was the object handling and image acquisition module, which fed and sliced the object sequentially and maintains the paraffine cool to be in solid state and captures the sectional image consecutively. The second one was the system control and interface module, which controls actuators for feeding, slicing, and image capturing. And the last was the image processing and visualization module, which processed a series of acquired sectional images and generated 3D volumetric model. Handling module was composed of the gripper, which grasped and fed 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 a form of bitmap file. 2D sectional image files were segmented from the background paraffine and utilized to generate the 3D model. Once 3-D model was constructed on the computer, user could manipulated it with various transformation methods such as translation, rotation, scaling including arbitrary sectional view.