Iso2mesh is a free, powerful, yet easy-to-use 3D mesh generator for Matlab and Octave. It is particularly suitable for creating high-quality surface and tetrahedral meshes from 3D medical imaging data, including binary, segmented or gray-scale volumetric images. Iso2mesh is cross-platform, quantitative, versatile, and fully optimized for better speed and low-memory requirement.
Iso2mesh toolbox contains over 90 modular Matlab functions, covering 3D volumetric image pre-processing (hole-filling, thinning and thickening), surface mesh modeling (extraction, remeshing, repairing, and smoothing), volumetric mesh creation, plotting and import/export for a range of mesh file formats. For some of the core functions, iso2mesh calls the self-contained meshing utilities built upon CGAL and tetgen to perform Delaunay tetrahedralization, a process known for producing high-quality, self-intersection-free surfaces and volumetric meshes.
Iso2mesh v1.0.1 is the first update to the stable release v1.0.0 announced 3 months ago. This release focuses on fixing bugs and issues reported by the users to enhance the stability and overall consistency. The meshing out from v1.0.1 is mostly identical to v1.0.0, except for 64bit Linux distributions where we added new binaries to utilize large memory (>4GB).
The iso2mesh 1.0.1 update gained the following compared to 1.0.0:
Particularly, the new 'cgalpoly' option gives user an open-source pipeline to generate tetrahedral meshes and completely by-passes the non-free tetgen step.
The detailed change logs can be found in the ChangeLog and SVN commit history pages.
To install the iso2mesh version 1.0.x, you need
To use fillhole3d or run some of the demo scripts, you need to install the image processing toolbox for Matlab or image toolbox for Octave.
We deeply appreciate the contribution from the CGAL team, who has done a marvelous work to develop state-of-the-art image-based mesh generation utilities. We also want to thank Hang Si for his great work for writing tetgen, which is heavily involved in iso2mesh's meshing work-flow.
For those of you who has used iso2mesh in your work, the author of this toolbox appreciates if you can cite the following paper in your publication, this will help tremendously for the future development of this software:
Qianqian Fang and David Boas, "Tetrahedral mesh generation from volumetric binary and gray-scale images," Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2009, pp. 1142-1145, 2009