Virtual Endoscopy

Overview
Papers
Presentations
Examples

Overview

Virtual endoscopy is the navigation of a virtual camera through the 3D reconstruction of a patient's anatomy enabling the exploration of the internal structures to assist in surgical planning. Our group has been developping a virtual endoscopy tool integrated into the 3D Slicer. With this tool, the surgeon can vizualize the 3D model of an anatomical structure and define a trajectory path both manually and automatically inside the model in order to perform a virtual exploration. When the virtual camera flies through the model, the surgeon can track the position of the virtual camera inside the model on one screen, view what the endoscopic camera sees on another screen and track the position of the camera on the original greyscale data (visualized as 2D slices). Virtual exploration through patient-specific data can help the surgeon perform a diagnosis without having to operate on the patient.

Papers

System

Delphine Nain. An Interactive Virtual Endoscopy Tool with Automatic Path Generation.
Masters Thesis, MIT AI Lab, May 2002.
22 MB
Delphine Nain, Steven Haker, Ron Kikinis, Eric Grimson. An Interactive Virtual Endoscopy Tool.
Interactive Medical Image Visualization and Analysis (IMIVA'01) at the Fourth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - MICCAI'01.

Applications

Delphine Nain, Steven Haker, W. Eric L. Grimson, Eric Cosman Jr, William M. Wells, Hoon Ji, Ron Kikinis, and Carl-Fredrik Westin.
Intra-Patient Prone to Supine Colon Registration for Synchronized Virtual Colonoscopy.
Fifth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - MICCAI'02.
In Press.

Movies and Presentations

Here is an overview presentation (with movies) of the virtual endoscopy system that describes manual and automatic path planning.
You can download the presentation alone masterworks.ppt (5MB)
and if you want the presentation and the movies that go with the presentation: masterworksWithMovies.tar.gz .

Examples

Virtual Colonoscopy

This is a movie of a virtual fly-through of a patient's colon. The patient is being diagnosed for polyps. The 3D model of the colon is color coded by an algorithm developped by Steven Haker et al, from the Surgical Planning Laboratory at the Brigham & Women's Hospital. The suspicious areas appear in blue. Centerline points through the colon have been extracted automatically by Steven Haker and the Virtual Endoscopic tool creates a fly-through path for the camera.
Available in: avi format, QuickTime format (.mov), animated gif (low resolution)

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Last updated May,1 2001.
Delphine Nain