The Path Planning of Virtual Endoscopy Based on Image Segmentation

Path planning is a prerequisite task to automatically navigate with virtual camera and plays a crucial role in virtual endoscopy (VE) application. The path planning algorithm based on segmentation combines the center-line path with the image segmentation by using the result of image segmentation to reduce the complexity of path planning. The algorithm makes use of the connectivity-preserving features of sequence images and segments a series of images by applying the adaptive region growing algorithm. It stores the seed of growing region into a series of stack as the key point of the navigation plan. Considering there are maybe some cavities after 2D segmentation, we propose a 3D region growing algorithm. The key point of navigation path is selected during segmentation, and the navigation path is obtained after smoothing those points. Experiment results show that our algorithm is feasible and robust.