Virtual Bronchoscopy
Patients potentially suffer and are exposed to danger during invasive bronchoscopic procedures and surgery. In order to reduce this hazardous risk, an interactive virtual environment for the simulation of bronchoscopy (virtual bronchoscopy) has been developed. Because of this state-of-the-art application, physicians can now obtain pre-operative information and perform pilot examinations in a virtual environment without any invasive or needless surgery. This 3-D lung volume data of the patient is first acquired from CT scanning, without any pain being inflicted upon the patient. Then a vessel-tracking process is used to extract the patients’ bronchial tree from the data. This data can be used to navigate and visualize the bronchial tree of patients in a natural and interactive manner.
