Clinical Evaluation of an Automatic Path Tracker for Virtual Colonoscopy

Virtual colonoscopy is a minimally invasive technique allowing early detection of colorectal polyps. A path or centerline through the colon can be very useful to perform virtual endoscopy. Manual path tracking is a very time-consuming task and the resulting path depends a lot on the experience of the operator. This severely limits the applicability of the path-based visualization and inspection methods. An automatic path tracker for virtual endoscopy was introduced in [3], based on previous work on minimal path extraction ([1]). First, we briefly recall the theory of the automatic path tracker, detailing how we adapt this method for virtual colonoscopy. We show the speed and robustness of this automatic path tracker by means of a multi-user study where we measured the total user time and the difference in results between users on 29 clinical cases.