Surface reconstruction from surface contours has become increasingly important in the medical field. Given a set of serial cross sections, it is shown that a structural technique of reconstruction can be developed. The motivation is to analyze the structure of the cross sections so as to represent the surface more faithfully than conventional techniques. The procedure involves syntactic and semantic techniques which allow the algorithm to analyze the cross sections at a high level. This information can then be used to recognize features on adjacent contours and then reproduce the surface which generated the cross sections.