Fly-In Visualization for Virtual Colonoscopy

In this paper, a new visualization method for tubular inner surfaces is proposed, denoted by “Fly-In”. The approach uses a virtual camera that moves along the inner surface's centerline, obtaining projections of the surrounding view, formed of small 3D topological rings, within the tube that is rendered as a 2D rectangular image. A new visualization loss measure is also presented, which utilizes the projection direction of the camera axis, the surface normal and the ratio of the camera focal length and the surface distance. A comparative study of Fly-in versus two state-of-the-art methods (Fly-Through and Fly-Over) is conducted on 3D reconstructed colons from CT Colonography (CTC) patient data. Quantitative results are computed using the new loss measure and visualized using color coding. Results show high performance for the proposed Fly-In approach with respect to the state-of-art.