Fast extraction of minimal paths in 3D images and applications to virtual endoscopy

The aim of this article is to build trajectories for virtual endoscopy inside 3D medical images, using the most automatic way. Usually the construction of this trajectory is left to the clinician who must define some points on the path manually using three orthogonal views. But for a complex structure such as the colon, those views give little information on the shape of the object of interest. The path construction in 3D images becomes a very tedious task and precise a priori knowledge of the structure is needed to determine a suitable trajectory. We propose a more automatic path tracking method to overcome those drawbacks: we are able to build a path, given only one or two end points and the 3D image as inputs. This work is based on previous work by Cohen and Kimmel [Int. J. Comp. Vis. 24 (1) (1997) 57] for extracting paths in 2D images using Fast Marching algorithm. Our original contribution is twofold. On the first hand, we present a general technical contribution which extends minimal paths to 3D images and gives new improvements of the approach that are relevant in 2D as well as in 3D to extract linear structures in images. It includes techniques to make the path extraction scheme faster and easier, by reducing the user interaction. We also develop a new method to extract a centered path in tubular structures. Synthetic and real medical images are used to illustrate each contribution. On the other hand, we show that our method can be efficiently applied to the problem of finding a centered path in tubular anatomical structures with minimum interactivity, and that this path can be used for virtual endoscopy. Results are shown in various anatomical regions (colon, brain vessels, arteries) with different 3D imaging protocols (CT, MR).