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Title: Technical Note: Unsupervised C-arm pose tracking with radiographic fiducial

Journal Article · · Medical Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1118/1.3566015· OSTI ID:22096984

Purpose: C-arm fluoroscopy reconstruction, such as that used in prostate brachytherapy, requires that the relative poses of the individual C-arm fluoroscopy images must be known prior to reconstruction. Radiographic fiducials can provide excellent C-arm pose tracking, but they need to be segmented in the image. The authors report an automated and unsupervised method that does not require prior segmentation of the fiducial. Methods: The authors compute the individual C-arm poses relative to a stationary radiographic fiducial of known geometry. The authors register a filtered 2D fluoroscopy image of the fiducial to its 3D model by using image intensity alone without prior segmentation. To enhance the C-arm images, the authors investigated a three-step cascade filter and a line enhancement filter. The authors tested the method on a composite fiducial containing beads, straight lines, and ellipses. Ground-truth C-arm pose was provided by a clinically proven method. Results: Using 111 clinical C-arm images and {+-}10 deg. and {+-}10 mm random perturbation around the ground-truth pose, a total of 2775 cases were evaluated. The average rotation and translation errors were 0.62 deg. (STD=0.31 deg.) and 0.72 mm (STD=0.55 mm) for the three-step filter and 0.67 deg. (STD=0.40 deg.) and 0.87 mm (STD=0.27 mm) using the line enhancement filter. Conclusions: The C-arm pose tracking method was sufficiently accurate and robust on human patient data for subsequent 3D implant reconstruction.

OSTI ID:
22096984
Journal Information:
Medical Physics, Vol. 38, Issue 4; Other Information: (c) 2011 American Association of Physicists in Medicine; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-2405
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English