The marching cubes algorithm (MC) is a powerful technique for surface rendering that can produce very high-quality images. However, it is not suitable for interactive manipulation of the 3D surfaces constructed from high-resolution volume datasets in terms of both space and time. In this paper, we present an adaptive version of MC called adaptive marching cubes (AMC). It significantly reduces the number of triangles representing the surface by adapting the size of the triangles to the shape of the surface. This improves the performance of the manipulation of the 3D surfaces. A typical example with the volume dataset of size 256×256×113 shows that the number of triangles is reduced by 55%. The quality of images produced by AMC is similar to that of MC. One of the fundamental problems encountered with adaptive algorithms is thecrack problem. Cracks may be created between two neighboring cubes processed with different levels of subdivision. We solve the crack problem by patching the cracks using polygons of the smae shape as those of the cracks. We propose a simple, but complete, method by first abstracting 22 basic configurations of arbitrarily sized cracks and then reducing the handling of these configurations to a simple rule. It requires onlyO(n ²) working memory for an×n×n volume data set.