Construction of a Virtual Bronchus Endoscopy System

摘要

Virtual Endoscopy System is a new aided diagnosis method based on computer processing of 3D image slices to provide simulated visualizations of specific organs similar to those produced by standard endoscopy. Compare with real endoscopy, VES has much advantages and will have more applications in the future. We constructed a Virtual Bronchus Endoscopy System based on the techniques of image analysis, compute graphics, and so on. Based on the characteristic of bronchus, we adopted an improved 3D region-growing algorithm, which we call 3D scanline algorithm to extract the bronchus from the DICOM-formatted medical images, then the 3D polyhedral surface model of bronchus is obtained by triangulation with Marching Cubes Algorithm. Then the user is allowed to navigate freely inside the bronchus along the axis. We adopted surface rendering method in the rendering process. In application this system can meet the requirement of real-time navigation and has pretty good display.