Bender: An Open Source Software for Efficient Model Posing and Morphing

Abstract

In this paper, we present Bender, an interactive and freely available software application for changing the pose of anatomical models that are represented as labeled, voxel-based volumes.

Voxelized anatomical models are used in numerous applications including the computation of specific absorption rates associated with cell phone transmission energies, radiation therapy, and electromagnetic dosimetry simulation. Other applications range from the study of ergonomics to the design of clothing. Typically, the anatomical pose of a voxelized model is limited by the imaging device used to acquire the source anatomical data; however, absorption of emitted energies and the fit of clothes will change based on anatomic pose.

Bender provides an intuitive, workflow-based user-interface to an extensible framework for changing the pose of anatomic models. Bender is implemented as a customized version of 3D Slicer, an image analysis and visualization framework that is widely used in the medical computing research community. The currently available repositioning methods in Bender are based on computer-graphics techniques for rigging, skinning, and resampling voxelized anatomical models. In this paper we present the software and compare two resampling methods: a novel extension to dual quaternions and finite element modeling (FEM) techniques. We show that FEM can be used to quickly and effectively resample repositioned anatomic models.