Extraction of cardiac and respiratory motion information from cardiac X-ray fluoroscopy images using hierarchical manifold learning

Abstract

We present a novel and clinically useful method to automatically determine the regions that carry cardiac and respiratory motion information directly from standard mono-plane X-ray fluoroscopy images. We demonstrate the application of our method for the purposes of retrospective cardiac and respiratory gating of X-ray images. Validation is performed on five mono-plane imaging sequences comprising a total of 284 frames from five patients undergoing radiofrequency ablation for the treatment of atrial fibrillation. We established end-inspiration, end-expiration and systolic gating with success rates of 100%, 100% and 95.3%, respectively. This technique is useful for retrospective gating of X-ray images and, unlike many previously proposed techniques, does not require specific catheters to be visible and works without any knowledge of catheter geometry. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.