Sinus Endoscopy - Application of Advanced GPU Volume Rendering for Virtual Endoscopy

For difficult cases in endoscopic sinus surgery, a careful planning of the intervention is necessary. Due to the reduced field of view during the intervention, the surgeons have less information about the surrounding structures in the working area compared to open surgery. Virtual endoscopy enables the visualization of the operating field and additional information, such as risk structures (e.g., optical nerve and skull base) and target structures to be removed (e.g., mucosal swelling). The Sinus Endoscopy system provides the functional range of a virtual endoscopic system with special focus on a realistic representation. Furthermore, by using direct volume rendering, we avoid time-consuming segmentation steps for the use of individual patient datasets. However, the image quality of the endoscopic view can be adjusted in a way that a standard computer with a modern standard graphics card achieves interactive frame rates with low CPU utilization. Thereby, characteristics of the endoscop...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Arno Krüger, Christoph Kubisch, Gero Strauß, Bernhard Preim
• Keywords: Endoscopic Sinus Surgery, Endoscopic View, Time-consuming Segmentation Steps, TVCG 2008