An interactive fly-path planning using potential fields and cell decomposition for virtual endoscopy

Virtual colonoscopy has been developed as a noninvasive computerized medical procedure for examining the entire colon to detect polyps. Our group has successfully implemented an interactive navigation using a physically based camera control model and a hardware-assisted visibility algorithm. Unfortunately, the pre-processing (skeleton and potential field generations) consumes too much computing time to be acceptable in an interactive clinical environment. In this work, we focus on skeleton simplification by eliminating excessive inconsistent branches. The simplification is performed before skeleton generation. The idea is to utilize a hierarchical analysis to determine principal points for the skeleton. We also propose dynamic target navigation for virtual endoscopy. We combine potentials derived from the distance between source and target positions and from the distance between source and colon surface to guide path search processes. These potentials are utilized to assign priority in choosing the paths far away from colon wall and in the direction of target positions