title: Automatic 3D reconstruction of electrophysiology catheters from two-view monoplane C-arm image sequences.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Catheter guidance is a vital task for the success of electrophysiology interventions. It is usually provided through fluoroscopic images that are taken intra-operatively. The cardiologists, who are typically equipped with C-arm systems, scan the patient from multiple views rotating the fluoroscope around one of its axes. The resulting sequences allow the cardiologists to build a mental model of the 3D position of the catheters and interest points from the multiple views.
  
  
  METHODS
  We describe and compare different 3D catheter reconstruction strategies and ultimately propose a novel and robust method for the automatic reconstruction of 3D catheters in non-synchronized fluoroscopic sequences. This approach does not purely rely on triangulation but incorporates prior knowledge about the catheters. In conjunction with an automatic detection method, we demonstrate the performance of our method compared to ground truth annotations.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In our experiments that include 20 biplane datasets, we achieve an average reprojection error of 0.43 mm and an average reconstruction error of 0.67 mm compared to gold standard annotation.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In clinical practice, catheters suffer from complex motion due to the combined effect of heartbeat and respiratory motion. As a result, any 3D reconstruction algorithm via triangulation is imprecise. We have proposed a new method that is fully automatic and highly accurate to reconstruct catheters in three dimensions.
authors.affiliation: Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Univ. München, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Baur
authors.affiliation: Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Univ. München, Munich, Germany. fausto.milletari@tum.de.
authors.forename: Fausto
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8319-4773
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Milletari
authors.affiliation: Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Univ. München, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Belagiannis
authors.affiliation: Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Univ. München, Munich, Germany.|Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Nassir
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Navab
authors.affiliation: Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Univ. München, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Pascal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fallavollita
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001145:Arrhythmias, Cardiac / Q000175:diagnosis*; D057785:Catheters; D022062:Electrophysiologic Techniques, Cardiac / Q000379:methods*; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005471:Fluoroscopy / Q000379:methods*; D006321:Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D009038:Motion
keywords: Arrhythmias; C-arm fluoroscopy; Catheter 3D reconstruction; Electrophysiology; Probabilistic graphical model