AUTOMATIC ENT SURGERY PREPLANNING USING A BACKTRACKING MAZE PROBLEM SOLUTION

摘要

A method, consisting of receiving a computerized tomography scan of at least a part of a body of a patient, and identifying voxels of the scan that correspond to regions in the body that are traversable by a probe inserted therein. The method also includes displaying the scan on a screen and marking thereon selected start and termination points for the probe. A processor finds a path from the start point to the termination point consisting of a connected set of the identified voxels. The processor also uses the scan to generate a representation of an external surface of the body and displays the representation on the screen. The processor then renders an area of the external surface surrounding the path locally transparent in the displayed representation, so as to make visible on the screen an internal structure of the body in a vicinity of the path.