Fusion of intracardiac ultrasound with 3D cardiac C-arm CT from animal data for electrophysiology

Abstract

In electrophysiology catheter ablation is an established treatment for cardiac arrhythmias. Nevertheless, complicated ablation procedures such as pulmonary vein isolation for atrial fibrillation treatment are difficult to learn. This can be improved by a better integration of the image modalities available today and in the future electrophysiology lab. In this paper, we present a method to register ultrasound images from an ICE catheter and 3D cardiac C-arm CT images, which can both be obtained during the intervention. This is the first step required to display the ICE images relative to the complex anatomy of the left atrium.