Normal virtual endoscopic anatomy of the upper airway

ABSTRACT

Virtual endoscopic examination is an easy, accurate and non-invasive tool for evaluation of the endoluminal airway. Normal anatomy of the generated views should be studied by heart for any radiologist who wants to enter this challenging and amazing field. Twenty patients were selected with normal airway and they were examined by helical CT with a pitch factor of 1.5 and axial overlapped cuts were obtained. The raw data were transferred via a local area network to the [Easy Vision] workstation where the virtual endoscopic views were generated. Comparison with the normal conventional endoscopic examination was done. The data obtained from the virtual endoscopic were identical to that obtained from the conventional endoscopic examination. The aim of this work is to emphasis upon the normal virtual endoscopic anatomy of the upper airway for the radiologists going to enter this interesting field for better orientation and easy picking up of the pathological lesions