Colon Flattening with Discrete Ricci Flow
MICCAI08 Workshop: Computational and Visualization Challenges in the New Era of Virtual Colonoscopy
Feng Qiu, Zhe Fan, Xiaotian Yin, Arie Kaufman, and Xianfeng David Gu
We present a novel colon flattening algorithm using the discrete
Ricci flow. The discrete Ricci flow is a powerful tool for designing
Riemannian metrics on surfaces with arbitrary topologies by user-defined
Gaussian curvatures. Moreover, the discrete Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian
metric on the surface conformally and minimizes the global
distortion, which means the local shape is well preserved. Two numerical
methods, the gradient descending method and Newton¡¯s method, for
computing the discrete Ricci flow have been implemented. Both methods
are accelerated with CUDA on the GPU. The flattened 2D rectangular
mesh of the colon is rendered using volumetric ray-casting method with
pseudo color to produce electronic biopsy images.