Huang Haofan, Yu Xiaxia, Tian Mu, He Weizhen, Li Shawn Xiang, Liang Zhengrong, Gao Yi
School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China.
Laboratory for Imaging Research and Informatics, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA.
Vis Comput Ind Biomed Art. 2022 Aug 3;5(1):20. doi: 10.1186/s42492-022-00116-1.
Pancreatoscopy plays a significant role in the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic diseases. However, the risk of pancreatoscopy is remarkably greater than that of other endoscopic procedures, such as gastroscopy and bronchoscopy, owing to its severe invasiveness. In comparison, virtual pancreatoscopy (VP) has shown notable advantages. However, because of the low resolution of current computed tomography (CT) technology and the small diameter of the pancreatic duct, VP has limited clinical use. In this study, an optimal path algorithm and super-resolution technique are investigated for the development of an open-source software platform for VP based on 3D Slicer. The proposed segmentation of the pancreatic duct from the abdominal CT images reached an average Dice coefficient of 0.85 with a standard deviation of 0.04. Owing to the excellent segmentation performance, a fly-through visualization of both the inside and outside of the duct was successfully reconstructed, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of VP. In addition, a quantitative analysis of the wall thickness and topology of the duct provides more insight into pancreatic diseases than a fly-through visualization. The entire VP system developed in this study is available at https://github.com/gaoyi/VirtualEndoscopy.git .
胰管镜检查在胰腺疾病的诊断和治疗中发挥着重要作用。然而，由于其严重的侵入性，胰管镜检查的风险明显高于其他内镜检查程序，如胃镜检查和支气管镜检查。相比之下，虚拟胰管镜检查（VP）已显示出显著优势。然而，由于当前计算机断层扫描（CT）技术的分辨率较低以及胰管直径较小，VP的临床应用受到限制。在本研究中，研究了一种最优路径算法和超分辨率技术，以开发基于3D Slicer的VP开源软件平台。从腹部CT图像中对胰管进行的分割，平均Dice系数达到0.85，标准差为0.04。由于出色的分割性能，成功重建了导管内外的飞越式可视化，从而证明了VP的可行性。此外，对导管壁厚和拓扑结构的定量分析比飞越式可视化能更深入地了解胰腺疾病。本研究中开发的整个VP系统可在https://github.com/gaoyi/VirtualEndoscopy.git获取。
