interactive mesh deformation for in - plane 3d segmentation / delineation for radiation therapy planning done on a slice by slice basis of a region / a volume of interest . segmentation starts by some automatic 3d algorithm approximating the organ surface roughly by some triangular surface mesh which mesh is afterwards manually refined by the user who deforms it to bring it closer to the region of interest . the deformation is an invertible , i . e . one - to - one , mapping avoiding self - intersections of the deformed mesh thereby preserving the topology of the anatomy . the deformation mapping involves a gaussian function restricting the deformation to a local region . the user picks with the pointer a start point on a selected image slice through the volume and moves it to some end point . the distance the mesh vertices move decreases exponentially with the distance to the start point . additionally , surface mesh resolution is increased by iteratively subdividing mesh triangles in the vicinity of a user - selected contour in a surface mesh until every pixel or voxel contains at least one triangle vertex .