| Many technical innovations in multimodal radiologic imaging and bronchoscopy have arisen to improve lung-cancer staging techniques. Among the innovations, endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS), which provides live guidance for localizing extraluminal sites, has become a standard procedure for cancerstaging bronchoscopy. Unfortunately, no direct linkage has been established between EBUS and the other modalities, leading to wide inter-physician performance variations and biopsy failures.;In this thesis, we propose a multimodal image-guided system that synergistically combines EBUS with the other imaging sources and enables a true fusion of EBUS and computed tomography (CT) for biopsy-site localization of extraluminal sites during bronchoscopy. In particular, we develop EBUS segmentation methods to better interpret EBUS.We also develop EBUS reconstruction and registration methods to correlate EBUS findings with the information derived from the other modalities. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.). |
