Polygonal Surface Data for Biological Geometry
Biomechanical geometry is frequently obtained as many points (e.g. a CAT scan or MRI). Software is then used or a program is written to represent these points by polygonal surfaces. These polygonal surfaces, sometimes hundreds of them, are read into TrueGrid® and are used as the boundaries of the mesh.
Researchers and experimentalists in the biological sciences have a wealth of voxel data. For example, the National Library of Medicine is creating a digital atlas of the human body (The Visible Human Project). Well established methods, such as marching cubes or alpha shapes, extract triangular surface representations from this voxel data using criteria such as variation in density. See also the software Geomagic Wrap available at Raindrop Geomagic.
TrueGrid®'s ability to seamlessly composite polygonal surfaces, analytical surfaces, IGES surfaces and any combination of these surfaces is a powerful tool for the analysis of biomechanical models. In addition, many of TrueGrid®'s built-in capabilities are particularly well-suited to the needs of those researchers who begin with polygonal surface data.
For information on biological data which can be purchased and used in TrueGrid®, contact Digimation. XYZ Scientific Applications, Inc. is not associated with Digimation.