Limited angle C-arm tomography and segmentation for guidance of atrial fibrillation ablation procedures

Abstract

Angiographic projections of the left atrium (LA) and the pulmonary veins (PV) acquired with a rotational C-arm system are used for 3D image reconstruction and subsequent automatic segmentation of the LA and PV to be used as roadmap in fluoroscopy guided LA ablation procedures. Acquisition of projections at high oblique angulations may be problematic due to increased collision danger of the detector with the right shoulder of the patient. We investigate the accuracy of image reconstruction and model based roadmap segmentation using limited angle C-arm tomography. The reduction of the angular range from 200° to 150° leads only to a moderate increase of the segmentation error from 1.5mm to 2.0 mm if matched conditions are used in the segmentation, i.e. the model based segmentation is trained on images reconstructed with the same angular range as the test images. The minor decrease in accuracy may be outweighed by clinical workflow improvement, gained when large C-arm angulations can be avoided.