Fully automated 2D-3D registration and verification.

Clinical application of 2D-3D registration technology often requires a significant amount of human interaction during initialisation and result verification. This is one of the main barriers to more widespread clinical use of this technology. We propose novel techniques for automated initial pose estimation of the 3D data and verification of the registration result, and show how these techniques can be combined to enable fully automated 2D-3D registration, particularly in the case of a vertebra based system. The initialisation method is based on preoperative computation of 2D templates over a wide range of 3D poses. These templates are used to apply the Generalised Hough Transform to the intraoperative 2D image and the sought 3D pose is selected with the combined use of the generated accumulator arrays and a Gradient Difference Similarity Measure. On the verification side, two algorithms are proposed: one using normalised features based on the similarity value and the other based on the pose agreement between multiple vertebra based registrations. The proposed methods are employed here for CT to fluoroscopy registration and are trained and tested with data from 31 clinical procedures with 417 low dose, i.e. low quality, high noise interventional fluoroscopy images. When similarity value based verification is used, the fully automated system achieves a 95.73% correct registration rate, whereas a no registration result is produced for the remaining 4.27% of cases (i.e. incorrect registration rate is 0%). The system also automatically detects input images outside its operating range.