Automatic detection of multiple and overlapping EP catheters in fluoroscopic sequences.

We propose a method to perform automatic detection of electrophysiology (EP) catheters in fluoroscopic sequences. Our approach does not need any initialization, is completely automatic, and can detect an arbitrary number of catheters at the same time. The method is based on the usage of blob detectors and clustering in order to detect all catheter electrodes, overlapping or not, within the X-ray images. The proposed technique is validated on 1422 fluoroscopic images yielding a tip detection rate of 99.3% and mean distance of 0.5mm from manually labeled ground truth centroids for all electrodes.