Implementation of a 3D thinning algorithm

Abstract

ITK currently comes with a 2D binary thinning (skeletonisation) method, but does not support 3D or higher. This paper documents a new itkBinaryThinningImageFilter3D and recommends to rename the current filter as itkBinaryThinningImageFilter2D. The 3D method suggested here is a direct implementation of the work of Lee et al. [2] who have demonstrated that their algorithm can find all deletable surface points at every iteration and is thus very fast. The code was tested on six clinical datasets.