A modification to our previous simulation of breast anatomy is proposed to improve the quality of simulated x-ray projections images. The image quality is affected by the voxel size of the simulation. Large voxels can cause notable spatial quantization artifacts; small voxels extend the generation time and increase the memory requirements. An improvement in image quality is achievable without reducing voxel size by the simulation of partial volume averaging in which voxels containing more than one simulated tissue type are allowed. The linear x-ray attenuation coefficient of voxels is, thus, the sum of the linear attenuation coefficients weighted by the voxel subvolume occupied by each tissue type. A local planar approximation of the boundary surface is employed. In the two-material case, the partial volume in each voxel is computed by decomposition into up to four simple geometric shapes. In the three-material case, by application of the Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem, the 3D partial volume problem is converted into one of a few simpler 2D surface area problems. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed methodology on simulated x-ray projections. An efficient encoding scheme is proposed for the type and proportion of simulated tissues in each voxel. Monte Carlo simulation was used to evaluate the quantitative error of our approximation algorithms.

We propose a robust method for detecting features on triangular meshes by combining normal tensor voting with neighbor supporting. Our method contains two stages: feature detection and feature refinement. First, the normal tensor voting method is modified to detect the initial features, which may include some pseudo features. Then, at the feature refinement stage, a novel salient measure deriving from the idea of neighbor supporting is developed. Benefiting from the integrated reliable salient measure feature, pseudo features can be effectively discriminated from the initially detected features and removed. Compared to previous methods based on the differential geometric property, the main advantage of our method is that it can detect both sharp and weak features. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm is robust, effective, and can produce more accurate results. We also discuss how detected features are incorporated into applications, such as feature-preserving mesh denoising and hole-filling, and present visually appealing results by integrating feature information.