title: Atlas-Based Mosaicing of Left Atrial 3-D Transesophageal Echocardiography Images.
abstract: Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is a promising imaging modality used to guide cardiac interventions, such as catheter ablation for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. These procedures rely on good visualization of the left atrium and pulmonary veins. To visualize these structures in a single volume, the acquisition, registration and fusion of multiple TEE views of the left atrium are required. We introduce atlas-based mosaicing as a method for the registration of images that are acquired according to a standardized protocol. Inspired by atlas-based segmentation approaches, compounded data of other patients serve as atlases for the registration of new data. The performance of atlas-based mosaicing is studied on 3-D TEE data of the left atrium and compared with that of regular pairwise registration. This study indicates that improved registration robustness and smaller registration errors are achieved with atlas-based mosaicing compared with regular pairwise registration. This is an important step toward the use of TEE for interventional guidance of ablation procedures.
authors.affiliation: Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Harriët W
authors.initials: HW
authors.lastname: Mulder
authors.affiliation: Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Marijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Stralen
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiology, Thoraxcenter, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Ben
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Thoraxcenter, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Haak
authors.affiliation: Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Max A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Viergever
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Thoraxcenter, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Johan G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Bosch
authors.affiliation: Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Electronic address: josien@isi.uu.nl.
authors.forename: Josien P W
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Pluim
mesh_terms: D019560:Echocardiography, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D017548:Echocardiography, Transesophageal / Q000379:methods*; D006325:Heart Atria / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
keywords: Image fusion; Image mosaicing; Image registration; Transesophageal echocardiography