Three dimensional digital model of a representative human kidney is needed
for a surgical simulator that is capable of simulating a laparoscopic surgery
involving kidney. Buying a three dimensional computer model of a representative
human kidney, or reconstructing a human kidney from an image sequence using
commercial software, both involve (sometimes significant amount of) money. In
this paper, author has shown that one can obtain a three dimensional surface
model of human kidney by making use of images from the Visible Human Data Set
and a few free software packages (ImageJ, ITK-SNAP, and MeshLab in particular).
Images from the Visible Human Data Set, and the software packages used here,
both do not cost anything. Hence, the practice of extracting the geometry of a
representative human kidney for free, as illustrated in the present work, could
be a free alternative to the use of expensive commercial software or to the
purchase of a digital model.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, accepted versio
