Motion Compensation by Registration-Based Catheter Tracking

摘要

The treatment of atrial fibrillation has gained increasing importance in the field of computer-aided interventions. State-of-the-art treatment involves the electrical isolation of the pulmonary veins attached to the left atrium under fluoroscopic X-ray image guidance. Due to the rather low soft-tissue contrast of X-ray fluoroscopy, the heart is difficult to see. To overcome this problem, overlay images from pre-operative 3-D volumetric data can be used to add anatomical detail. Unfortunately, these overlay images are static at the moment, i.e., they do not move with respiratory and cardiac motion. The lack of motion compensation may impair X-ray based catheter navigation, because the physician could potentially position catheters incorrectly. To improve overlay-based catheter navigation, we present a novel two stage approach for respiratory and cardiac motion compensation. First, a cascade of boosted classifiers is employed to segment a commonly used circumferential mapping catheter which is firmly fixed at the ostium of the pulmonary vein during ablation. Then, a 2-D/2-D model-based registration is applied to track the segmented mapping catheter. Our novel hybrid approach was evaluated on 10 clinical data sets consisting of 498 fluoroscopic monoplane frames. We obtained an average 2-D tracking error of 0.61 mm, with a minimum error of 0.26 mm and a maximum error of 1.62 mm. These results demonstrate that motion compensation using registration-based catheter tracking is both feasible and accurate. Using this approach, we can only estimate in-plane motion. Fortunately, compensating for this is often sufficient for EP procedures where the motion is governed by breathing.