Model of a vascular C-arm for 3D augmented fluoroscopy in interventional radiology.

This paper deals with the modeling of a vascular C-arm to generate 3D augmented fluoroscopic images in an interventional radiology context. A methodology based on the use of a multi-image calibration is proposed to assess the physical behavior of the C-arm. From the knowledge of the main characteristics of the C-arm, realistic models of the acquisition geometry are proposed. Their accuracy was evaluated and experiments showed that the C-arm geometry can be predicted with a mean 2D reprojection error of 0.5 mm. The interest of 3D augmented fluoroscopy is also assessed on a clinical case.