Volume rendering based interactive navigation within the human colon

We present an interactive navigation system for virtual colonoscopy, which is based solely on high performance volume rendering. Previous colonic navigation systems have employed either a surface rendering or a Z-buffer-assisted volume rendering method that depends on the surface rendering results. Our method is a fast direct volume rendering technique that exploits distance information stored in the potential field of the camera control model, and is parallelized on a multiprocessor. Experiments have been conducted on both a simulated pipe and patients' data sets acquired with a CT scanner.