Hexahedral meshing of subject-specific anatomic structures using registered building blocks

To extend the use of computational techniques like finite element analysis to clinical settings, it would be beneficial to have the ability to generate a unique model for every subject quickly and efficiently. To this end, we previously developed two mapped meshing tools that utilized force and displacement control to map a template mesh to a subject-specific surface. This work is an extension of those methods; the objective of this study was to map a template block structure, common to multi-block meshing techniques, to a subject-specific surface. The rationale was that the blocks are considerably less refined and may be readily edited, thereby yielding a mesh of high quality in less time than mapping the mesh itself. In this paper, the versatility and robustness of the method was verified by processing four datasets. The method was found to be robust enough to cope with the variability of bony surface size, spatial position and geometry, producing building block structures that generated meshes comparable to those produced using building block structures that were created manually.