User-friendly Environment for Virtual Endoscopy

Virtual endoscopy has recently arisen as a powerful diagnostic tool for examining the interior structures of bronchus, colon, and etc. In contrast to optical endoscopy that is invasive, virtual endoscopy is non-invasive and thus it is comfortable to patients. In addition, while the optical endoscopy enables observers to examine the hollow structures in the direction that the camera moves, the virtual endoscopy can visualize the structures in any direction. We present an interactive virtual endoscopy system that is user-friendly and useful for the diagnosis. The navigation path is generated in the real time without any preprocessing such as segmentation procedures. The endoscopy system provides a 3D volume rendered image as a navigation map, and has the MPR image along the path and a 2D axial image as a reference image. These reference images are good guides to diagnose tissues and their neighbors. The endoscopy images are generated using the volume rendering and thus it has a good quality comparing with surface rendering. The experimental results show the comfortable user interface of our endoscopy system.