engleski

VRML-based model creation for virtual bronchoscopy

In this paper, a technique is presented for CT image analysis and visualization of the bronchial airways. This technique provides a non-invasive way to examine the interior of the bronchial tubes and detect various properties of the tubes such as abnormal morphology caused by foreign objects stuck in the airways or some other disease. In virtual endoscopy, there are no restrictions on the position of the endoscope so the operator can also have view of structures outside the airways the would be impossible to see using classical endoscopy. The input to the procedure are chest images obtained by spiral computed tomography (CT). The 3-D image analysis of the data is performed to extract the airways from the images. This part of the procedure includes preprocessing of images, followed by image segmentation. The result of segmentation is a 3-D binary image representing the location of the airways. In the consequent step, the 3-D volume is converted from raster format to Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format using the marching cube algorithm. A 3-D central axis of the bronchial tubes is extracted from the 3-D segmented airways. The medial axis is used as a path for a fly-through animation of the airways. The medial axis is determined by computing the 3-D skeleton of the bronchial tubes volume. The resulting VRML model can be viewed using any VRML-enabled WWW browser, locally or over the network.

VRML; median axis transform; virtual endoscopy

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