Centerline and blockstructure for fast structured mesh generation

Abstract In contrast to unstructured meshes, structured meshes yield faster simulation results for bio-medical simulations, but are very time-consuming to create. A preprocessing step in the generation of structured meshes is the manual construction of a blockstructure approximating the vessel. Here, we present an automatic centerline calculation and blockstructure generation to reduce the user effort and time of structured mesh generation. The centerline is detected as points in between opposite faces. Based on the centerline, cross sections are determined and a blockstructure which approximates the vessel is automatically generated. The centerline detection does not require time-consuming user input and meshes with more than 195,000 vertices are processed in less than 160 seconds. The results of the presented automatic centerline detection are compared to a centerline with manual input generated by the widely used vmtk tool. The centerlines are similar, small differences occur at bifurcation and at the aneurysm.