An inverse 3D lung deformation analysis for medical visualization

Medical simulation and visualization of 3D lung deformations is an effective tool for guiding clinical technicians on clinical maneuvers. Technical advances in clinical imaging have led to the extraction of patient-specific 3D static lung models. However, in order to visualize a human subject’s lung deformation at different physical conditions, it is required to animate (or deform) the 3D lung models using a physicallybased method. In this paper we discuss an approach for estimating the subject-specific lung’s deformation operator that models the physically-based elastic interaction undergone in deforming a human’s 3D lung model. The transfer function is estimated from the nodal displacements of the 3D lung models obtained from the 4D Computed Tomography (CT) data of a normal human subject and an estimated amount of force applied. Accuracy of the estimated transfer functions is verified by resimulating the morphology.