Design of a flexible interactive tool for guided bronchoscopy

This article proposes an interactive tool for guided bronchoscopy for providing a real-time virtual bronchoscopy environment. The structure is suggested to be patient specific, which is especially useful in lieu of lung lesion detection, either for biopsy or for pre-planning of lobectomy. While the typical procedure is sensor based or rigid registration, this tool stresses more importance towards the interactivity for correlating the region of interest in patient specific three-dimensional space. Along with this mechanism, the tool additionally can identify and mark the visible bronchial branches on screen. The proposed methods give 100% accessibility rate in case of sampling right lung branches as obtained from a general model and a 52% yield rate in terms of analyzing two-dimensional bronchoscopic view at a low computation cost.