Semi-automatic catheter reconstruction from two views.

We propose novel methods for (a) detection of a catheter in fluoroscopic images and (b) reconstruction of this catheter from two views. The novelty of (a) is a reduced user interaction and a higher accuracy. It requires only a single seed point on the catheter in the fluoroscopic image. Using this starting point, possible parts of the catheter are detected using a graph search. An evaluation of the detection using 66 clinical fluoroscopic images yielded an average error of 0.7 mm +/- 2.0 mm. The novelty of (b) is a better ability to deal with highly curved objects as it selects an optimal set of point correspondences from two point sequences describing the catheters in two fluoroscopic images. The selected correspondences are then used for computation of the 3-D reconstruction. The evaluation on 33 clinical biplane images yielded an average backprojection error of 0.4 mm +/- 0.6 mm.