Three-modality registration for guidance of minimally invasive cardiac interventions

Abstract

Image guidance of minimally invasive cardiac interventions can be augmented by registering together different imaging modalities. In this paper, we propose a method to combine three modalities: X-ray fluoroscopy, trans-esophageal ultrasound and pre-procedure MRI or CT. The registration of the pre-procedure image involves a potentially unreliable manual initialisation of its position in an X-ray projection view. The method therefore includes an automatic correction using the esophagus location as an additional constraint. We test the method in a phantom experiment and find that initialising the pre-procedure image with up to 9mm offset from its correct position results in a 92% registration success rate. The esophagus constraint improves the capture range in the out-of-plane direction, which simplifies the manual initialisation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.