Slice-based virtual endoscopy navigation

Navigation path planning is a crucial part of virtual endoscopy, but the identification of the optimal fly-through path is a time-intensive process. This paper describes a prototype system for virtual endoscopy and proposes a slice-based approach to calculating the path of the virtual camera that uses the slice borderlines of region-of-interest images to obtain the approximate centreline, centralised locally with respect to the hollow object wall. By using the 2D slice borderlines to express the hollow object boundary, the path searching and polygon intersection computing are simplified and made more efficient. Finally, we present results of our algorithm tested on the Visible Human data set