Web-based virtual endoscopy.

A web-based application for computed tomography (CT) image analysis and visualization of the bronchial airways is presented in the paper. The technique used in this application provides a noninvasive way to examine the interior of the bronchial tubes. Many different properties of the tubes such as presence of the foreign objects or structure abnormalities of the tubes can be detected this way. This method can also be used for other similar structures, such as blood vessels. The application uses the CT images obtained by spiral computed tomography as input. Amplitude thresholding is used for segmentation of the airways. The medial axis of the airways has been used as the path for animation. The procedure produces a fly-through animation in the MPEG format, which is obtained by volume rendering of the original CT images along the extracted path. The user can choose the appropriate path using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) model, which is sufficient for visualization of basic structures. The algorithms and the software have been developed on the SUN Ultra 1 workstation.