Marching cubes

Marching cubes is a computer graphics algorithm, published in the 1987 SIGGRAPH proceedings by Lorensen and Cline, for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three-dimensional discrete scalar field (the elements of which are sometimes called voxels). The applications of this algorithm are mainly concerned with medical visualizations such as CT and MRI scan data images, and special effects or 3-D modelling with what is usually called metaballs or other metasurfaces. The marching cubes algorithm is meant to be used for 3-D; the 2-D version of this algorithm is called the marching squares algorithm.