Guide wire tracking during endovascular interventions

Abstract

A method is presented to extract and track the position of a guide wire during endovascular interventions under X-ray fluoroscopy. The method can be used to improve guide wire visualization in the low quality fluoroscopy images. A two-step procedure is utilized to track the guide wire in subsequent frames. First a rough estimate of the displacement is obtained using a template matching procedure. Subsequently, the position of the guide wire is determined by fitting the guide wire to a feature image in which line-like structures are enhanced. In this optimization step the influence of the scale at which the feature is calculated and the additional value of using directional information is investigated. The method is applied both on the original and subtraction images. Using the proper parameter settings, the guide wire could successfully be tracked based on the original images, in 141 out of 146 frames from 5 image sequences.