Bronchoscopy is an effective minimally invasive procedure for detecting early-stage lung cancer lesions along the airway walls. Related to this point, Narrow-Band Imaging (NBI) has been shown to be an especially effective bronchoscopic modality for bronchial lesion detection. Unfortunately, NBI bronchoscopy tends to be overly tedious for the physician to use routinely for early lung cancer detection, because of a lack of effective tools for facilitating an exam of the complex airway tree. In addition, no tools exist for documenting an airway exam. To address this problem, we propose an interactive graphical analysis system that offers: 1) navigational guidance to facilitate efficient bronchoscopic airway exams; 2) real-time lesion detection to enable automatic analysis of the incoming video; and 3) visualization tools to provide a comprehensive assessment of an airway exam. Using a series of NBI airway exam videos from lung cancer patients, our system demonstrated the potential ability to detect and localize lesions in real-time as the physician performs a systematic guided bronchoscopic navigation through the airways. The system also enables more efficient documentation of findings than current clinical practice. In particular, a profile is produced for each detected lesion comprising all video frames depicting the lesion. In addition, the profile is associated with an airway path generated from the patient’s 3D chest CT scan to provide airway location information. Associated navigational instructions enable the physician to reach the lesion during follow-up examinations. Lastly, our system summarized an entire NBI airway exam using only 2% of the video frames to denote lesions and excluded the remaining 98% of a video depicting normal findings.
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