Three-dimensional motion tracking of coronary arteries in biplane cineangiograms

Abstract

A three-dimensional (3-D) method for tracking the coronary arteries through a temporal sequence of biplane X-ray angiography images is presented. A 3-D centerline model of the coronary vasculature is reconstructed from a biplane image pair at one time frame, and its motion is tracked using a coarse-to-fine hierarchy of motion models. Three-dimensional constraints on the length of the arteries and on the spatial regularity of the motion field are used to overcome limitations of classical two-dimensional vessel tracking methods, such as tracking vessels through projective occlusions. This algorithm was clinically validated in five patients by tracking the motion of the left coronary tree over one cardiac cycle. The root mean square reprojection errors were found to be submillimeter in 93% (54/58) of the image pairs. The performance of the tracking algorithm was quantified in three dimensions using a deforming vascular phantom. RMS 3-D distance errors were computed between centerline models tracked in the X-ray images and gold-standard centerline models of the phantom generated from a gated 3-D magnetic resonance image acquisition. The mean error was 0.69(±0.06) mm over eight temporal phases and four different biplane orientations.

Reconstruction of coronary arteries from X-ray angiography: A review

“…Older angiography systems are equipped with image intensifier that generates images with distortion due to its design. These distortions must be corrected either before applying the reconstruction method (Shechter et al, 2003a) or within the reconstruction method (Cañero et al, 2000). However, now the new angiography systems make use of flat panel detectors, which can create distortion free X-ray images (Strobel et al, 2009).…”

“…A popular strategy for 4D reconstruction is to propagate an initial 3D reconstruction from a reference cardiac phase to the rest of the phases (Hui and Friedman, 2002;Zheng et al, 2010;Sarry and Boire, 2001;Shechter et al, 2003a;Bouattour et al, 2005;Tsin et al, 2009). Depending on the reconstruction methodology, there are two ways to accomplish this propagation.…”

“…On the other hand, back-projection based modelling method approaches 4D reconstruction as a temporal transformation estimation problem. Specifically, these methods parameterise a 3D/4D transformation, which is applied to the reference 3D reconstruction, such that the projections of the deformed reconstruction align with the 2D projection images (Figure 8) (Shechter et al, 2003a;Bouattour et al, 2005;Tsin et al, 2009;Blondel et al, 2006;Bousse Ast et al, 2009). A rigid or affine transformation for each cardiac phase is optimized in (Tsin et al, 2009).…”

C-arm CT: Reconstruction of dynamic high contrast objects applied to the coronary sinus

“…Cubic B-spline functions are widespread for cardiac motion parameterization in 2-D [17], 3-D [8] and 4-D [9]. If the number of control points equals the number of image voxels, each voxel is assigned an individual displacement vector.…”

“…For that an estimate of the object motion is required which is commonly obtained by registering symbolic reconstructions of different motion phases [8], [9], [10].…”