The SimBio-Vgrid mesh generator

Introduction

SimBio-Vgrid (or Vgrid for short) is a fast and robust octree-based 3D mesh generator for unstructured grids. Its main features are:

• Works directly on segmented (labeled) 3D images, for example segmented medical CT (computed tomography) or MR (magnetic resonance) images
• Generates either uniform hexahedral or non-uniform tetrahedral images
• Optional boundary smoothing for tetrahedral meshes by marching tetrahedra
• Optional iterative smoothing of boundaries and interior elements
• Very fast: generates meshes with 1,000,000 elements in about half a minute on a PC
• Fully automatic mesh generation from the command line

Have a look at the gallery and on the tutorial to see what is possible with Vgrid.

History ...

Vgrid is an outcome of the EU IST project SimBio, where it was used to create meshes for head mechanics, knee mechanics and source localization.
Please note: The SimBio homepage is not available at the moment. There are plans to set it up again.

Vgrid was initially developed by Frithjof Kruggel and Ulrich Hartmann at Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (MPI) in Leipzig, and later continued by Ulrich Hartmann and Guntram Berti at the (now defunct) NEC Laboratories Europe (NLE-IT) in St. Augustin.

... and Future

Vgrid will not be developed further by NEC or MPI, as it has been superseded by a new, more general approach (Mesh & More). However, Ulrich Hartmann and Guntram Berti will maintain this web site and include bug fixes and minor improvements. Please direct comments, wishes, bugs etc. to Guntram Berti.

Availability and Terms of Use

Vgrid is available in source form (C/C++) free of charge under the GPL. You can download the latest version of Vgrid (Version 1.3.1 as of 25-05-2010).

The source distribution contains an adapted version of the Vista image processing library; this part is Copyright © University of British Columbia. Vgrid expects input in the Vista format; a converter from DICOM to Vista is dcm2v by Gert Wollny (you need also vista-io and XMedCon). If you experience problem, you may try an older version of dcm2v instead, which does not try to read out information on z-slice spacing. Note however that voxel scaling might be incorrect in z direction in this case.

Documentation & Installation

Vgrid is written in C++ and should compile with any recent C++ compiler (compilers as old as gcc 2.96 and icc 6.0 are known to work), on most Unix systems (tested on Linux). On MS Windows, you should install cygwin first.

A hypertext version of the Vgrid man page is available. Some examples show the capabilities (and limitations) of Vgrid.