An Interactive Virtual Endoscopy Tool

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a 3D Virtual Endoscopy system for facilitating diagnostic and surgical planning phases of endoscopic procedures. Our system allows the user to interactively explore the internal surface of a 3D patient-specific anatomical model and to create and update a fly-through trajectory through the model to simulate endoscopy. We also present an automatic path planning algorithm that has been used to produce a colon fly-through with our system. We integrated our program in the 3D Slicer, a medical visualization program created at the MIT AI Lab in collaboration with the Surgical Planning Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital [1]. It provides the surgeons with a single environment to generate 3D models, use quantitative analysis tools and conduct a virtual endoscopy. The Virtual Endoscopy program has been used for virtual colonoscopy and cardiovascular projects. In the next section, we present the motivation for interactive virtual endoscopy and the related work in the field. In Section 3, we describe our Virtual Endoscopy system. In Section 4, we present an automatic path planning algorithm that produces center points used by our system to fly-through a colon dataset. We conclude the paper with a discussion and evaluation of results.