著者

長谷川 純一

出版者

Japanese Society for Medical Virtual Reality

雑誌

VR医学 (ISSN:13479342)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.1, no.1, pp.21-29, 2002

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In this paper, the present state and the future of virtual endoscopy (VE) are stated. VE is a system which can generate endoscopic images of inner organs only using 3D CT images of a real human body. This new diagnostic tool has advantage that can be applied to patients without pain, and that enables us to observe the state of inner human body from any position and direction. Usually, VE should have several basic functions including rendering, segmentation, measurement and user interface. Recently, some advanced functions for abnormal lesion detection, simultaneous display of real and virtual endoscopic images and organ deformation with force feedback have been also investigated. VE can be applied to many fields including diagnosis, surgery and medical education, and some systemd have already been in clinical use.