Co-Registration of Virtual and Optical Colonoscopy Views

While optical colonoscopy (OC) is still considered the gold standard and is necessary for performing polypectomies when required, virtual colonoscopy (VC) systems present certain advantages over the traditional OC, such as increased coverage of the colon wall and the ability to utilize computer-aided detection (CAD) techniques. In order to leverage the abilities provided by both OC and VC, a method for registering the OC and VC views is necessary, such that a suspicious area in the OC can be investigated in the VC, and vice versa. We propose here a method of performing this registration based on the view paths taken by the endoscopes (real and virtual) in traveling through the colon. Given a view location in the OC, this correlation allows for the corresponding view in the VC to be displayed. In this study, virtual colon data is used to simulate the OC.