Hexahedral Meshing of Subject-Specific Anatomic Structures Using Registered Building Blocks

Generating high quality, subject-specific, 3D finite element anatomic models with minimal user-intervention remains a challenge. Numerous automated tetrahedral mesh generators are available, but hexahedral meshes are preferred due to their higher accuracy and faster computational time over tetrahedral meshes. Historically, the generation of hexahedral meshes for analysis is a tedious and time-consuming task. Therefore, the utilization of hexahedral meshes is often limited to baseline models that are powerful, but not patient-specific. Once a high quality mesh has been created, it would be ideal if it can be used to create meshes of similar surfaces from different subjects, without disrupting mesh quality.