Virtual reality for the characterization of blood vessel to airway geometric relationships

An increase in the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the pulmonary arteries has been implicated in the progression of emphysema in COPD patients. Standardization of vessel size requires matching segments of the airway with their corresponding blood vessels. Automated matching is still error-prone, and manual matching by sifting through 2D slices is tedious and time-consuming. We propose a virtual reality (VR) system for the visualization of the airway and the vascular tree as a means of streamlining the verification of appropriate airway/vascular segment pairs selected for quantitation of arterial CSAs. In this work, we outline the technical specifications and design considerations and challenges for such system; we also compare user's performance on the proposed system with the conventional 2D method.