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The aim of this project is to build trajectories for virtual endoscopy inside 3D medical images, using the most automatic way. Usually the construction of this trajectory is left to the clinician who must define some points on the path manually using three orthogonal views. But for a complex structure such as the colon, those views give little information on the shape of the object of interest. The path construction in 3D images becomes a very tedious task and precise a priori knowledge of the structure is needed to determine a suitable trajectory. We propose a more automatic path tracking method to overcome those drawbacks: we are able to build a path, given only one or two end points and the 3D image as inputs. This work is based on previous work in Cohen-Kimmel(98) for extracting paths in 2D images using Fast Marching algorithm.
Our original contribution is to extend this technique to 3D and give new improvements of the approach that are relevant in 2D as well as in 3D. We also introduce several methods to reduce the computation cost and the user interaction. We also closely examine a fast implementation of the path extraction. Synthetic and real medical images are used to illustrate each contribution.
We show that this technique can be efficiently applied to the problem of finding a centered path in tubular anatomical structures with minimum interactivity, and we apply it to path construction for virtual endoscopy. Virtual endoscopy results are shown in various anatomical regions (colon, brain vessels, arteries) with different 3D imaging protocols (CT, MR).
We demonstrate that our method
I just found out that our Centerline detection algorithm has been referenced in a 2002 conference paper, where among all other previous references, it was giving the best results. Check out Sadleir and Whelan, Colon Centerline Calculation for CT Colonography using Optimised 3D Topological Thinning", 3DPVT 2002 - The International Symposium on 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission, Padova, Italy, June 19-21, 2002 Of course they propose a new method in their article, and if it's better than mine, then it is the best.
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| Virtual Endoscopy in the Colon (Colonoscopy) | Virtual Endoscopy in the Trachea / Larynx | Virtual Endoscopy in the Abdominal Aorta | Virtual Endoscopy in a Brain Vessel |