Fig. 1

The creation of patient-actual virtual 3-D pulmonary model. (a-c) After the communications-in-medicine (DICOM) format images, which were obtained from 120 of 1-mm thin-sliced high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT)-scan images of tumor and hilum, were uploaded to a personal computer (PC), homemade software “CTTRY” (Tokyo Women’s Medical University, Tokyo, Japan) allowed surgeons to mark pulmonary arteries, veins, bronchi, and tumor on the HRCT image manually and attempt to reconstruct an anatomical model with the help of anatomically correct images. (d) The locations and thicknesses of the pulmonary vessels and bronchi were rendered as various sizes of cylinders. In accordance with the resulting numerical data, a 3-D image was reconstructed with software Metasequoia shareware (http://metaseq.net/). (e) The data of the reconstructed 3-D images was converted with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2012 (Autodesk, San Rafael, CA, USA). On the PC, reconstructed 3-D pulmonary images were appeared as left- and right- eye view images and also output to a 3-D monitor