A Methodological Review of 3D Reconstruction Techniques in Tomographic Imaging

Computer Vision has provided immense support to medical diagnostics over the past two decades. Analogous to Non Destructive Testing of mechanical parts, advances in medical imaging has enabled surgeons to determine root cause of an illness by consulting medical images particularly 3-D imaging. 3-D modeling in medical imaging has been pursued using surface rendering, volume rendering and regularization based methods. Tomographic reconstruction in 3D is different from camera based scene reconstruction which has been achieved using various techniques including minimal surfaces, level sets, snakes, graph cuts, silhouettes, multi-scale approach, patchwork etc. In tomography limitations of image aquisition method i-e CT Scan, X Rays and MRI as well as non availability of camera parameters for calibration restrict the quality of final reconstruction. In this work, a comprehensive study of related approaches has been carried out with a view to provide a summary of state of the art 3D modeling algorithms developed over the past four decades and also to provide a foundation study for our future work which will include precise 3D reconstruction of human spine.