ToPoMesh: accurate 3D surface reconstruction from CT volumetric data via topology modification

Traditional computed tomography (CT) methods for 3D reconstruction face resolution limitations and require time-consuming post-processing workflows. While deep learning techniques improve the accuracy of segmentation, traditional voxel-based segmentation and surface reconstruction pipelines tend to introduce artifacts such as disconnected regions, topological inconsistencies, and stepped distortions. To overcome these challenges, we propose ToPoMesh, an end-to-end 3D mesh reconstruction deep learning framework for direct reconstruction of high-fidelity surface meshes from CT volume data. To address the existing problems, our approach introduces three core innovations: (1) accurate local and global shape modeling by preserving and enhancing local feature information through residual connectivity and self-attention mechanisms in graph convolutional networks; (2) an adaptive variant density (Avd) mesh de-pooling strategy, which dynamically optimizes the vertex distribution; (3) a topology modification module that iteratively prunes the error surfaces and boundary smoothing via variable regularity terms to obtain finer mesh surfaces. Experiments on the LiTS, MSD pancreas tumor, MSD hippocampus, and MSD spleen datasets demonstrate that ToPoMesh outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate a 57.4% reduction in Chamfer distance (liver) and a 0.47% improvement in F-score compared to end-to-end 3D reconstruction methods, while qualitative results confirm enhanced fidelity for thin structures and complex anatomical topologies versus segmentation frameworks. Importantly, our method eliminates the need for manual post-processing, realizes the ability to reconstruct 3D meshes from images, and can provide precise guidance for surgical planning and diagnosis.