Image-based view-angle independent cardiorespiratory motion gating and coronary sinus catheter tracking for x-ray-guided cardiac electrophysiology procedures

Robust navigation support in lowest dose image setting

PURPOSE

Clinical cardiac electrophysiology (EP) is concerned with diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmia describing abnormality or perturbation in the normal activation sequence of the myocardium. With the recent introduction of lowest dose X-ray imaging protocol for EP procedures, interventional image enhancement has gained crucial importance for the well-being of patients as well as medical staff.

METHODS

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to detect and track different EP catheter electrodes in lowest dose fluoroscopic sequences based on [Formula: see text]-sparse coding and online robust PCA (ORPCA). Besides being able to work on real lowest dose sequences, the underlying methodology achieves simultaneous detection and tracking of three main EP catheters used during ablation procedures.

RESULTS

We have validated our algorithm on 16 lowest dose fluoroscopic sequences acquired during real cardiac ablation procedures. In addition to expert labels for 2 sequences, we have employed a crowdsourcing strategy to obtain ground truth labels for the remaining 14 sequences. In order to validate the effect of different training data, we have employed a leave-one-out cross-validation scheme yielding an average detection rate of [Formula: see text].

CONCLUSION

Besides these promising quantitative results, our medical partners also expressed their high satisfaction. Being based on [Formula: see text]-sparse coding and online robust PCA (ORPCA), our method advances previous approaches by being able to detect and track electrodes attached to multiple different catheters.

An Overview on Image Registration Techniques for Cardiac Diagnosis and Treatment

Image registration has been used for a wide variety of tasks within cardiovascular imaging. This study aims to provide an overview of the existing image registration methods to assist researchers and impart valuable resource for studying the existing methods or developing new methods and evaluation strategies for cardiac image registration. For the cardiac diagnosis and treatment strategy, image registration and fusion can provide complementary information to the physician by using the integrated image from these two modalities. This review also contains a description of various imaging techniques to provide an appreciation of the problems associated with implementing image registration, particularly for cardiac pathology intervention and treatments.