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Sci‐Fri AM General‐08: Image Fusion for Catheter Tracking in MR‐Guided Endovascular Therapy
Author(s) -
Draper JN,
Sabati M,
Lauzon ML,
Frayne R
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.2244673
Subject(s) - medicine , fluoroscopy , catheter , image fusion , iterative reconstruction , computer vision , artificial intelligence , scanner , image processing , radiology , computer science , image (mathematics)
Endovascular therapy describes a class of minimally invasive treatments for certain vascular diseases, including the placement of stents to correct arterial stenoses, and the administration of intra‐arterial thrombolysis for ischemic stroke. Our objective is to develop a real‐time system to guide interventional endovascular procedures with MR imaging. Our approach in developing this system is to mimic, where appropriate and possible, the functionality of current clinical x‐ray fluoroscopy systems. Our endovascular MR system is comprised of two major components: a data acquisition module and an image reconstruction module. Data acquisition was performed using a 3‐tesla MR scanner (Signa VH/i; General Electric Healthcare; Waukesha, WI). Image reconstruction was performed on a separate dedicated workstation (2.2‐GHz Athlon processor‐equipped workstation running Windows XP). We achieved catheter visualization by filling catheters with MR contrast and imaging using a multi‐cycle projection dephaser to suppress the background signal. We used image‐processing filters available in the VTK library to isolate the catheter in the background‐suppressed images. The output of this image‐filtering pipeline was then used as a mask for an anatomical roadmap image. The image fusion process described herein has successfully been used to combine background‐suppressed in vivo images of a catheter with anatomical roadmap images. The fusion process removed most of the noise and residual background signal from the background‐suppressed image, leaving the catheter with improved conspicuity. Our endovascular MR system functions in a similar manner to x‐ray fluoroscopic systems and has applications in the treatment of stroke and other vascular diseases.