Friday, September 18, 2009

the virtual endoscopy


Here you can see the lung. For a upcoming presentation, I've been messing with some settings with the endoscopy system I've developed a year ago with focus on nasal sinuses, however it works for other hollow organs just fine. My supervisor on this project (diploma thesis) had made contacts with the university clinic in Leipzig and together with a leading ENT-surgeon, the usability of the system was tweaked. At the end it was used in larger clinical study at two locations with some 100+ patients (who prefered virtual pictures over video hehe). Texturing is tri-planar and several post steps are needed to smooth normals and so on (inter-leaved sampling, hitpoint refinement....).
More details about implementation can be found in one of the publications around this project:
SinusEndoscopy-IEEE Vis 2008 Paper, Slides

Main focus was a surface depiction that is similar to what the surgeons are used too (but not too real, to prevent false impression of too much data security, CT cannot show tissue diseases). The effect is similar to the Cascades-Nvidia demo.

And some videos:
IEEE Vis 2008 Video
Colonoscopy
Neck endoscopy