Vesselness-based 2D-3D registration of the coronary arteries

Purpose Robust and accurate automated co-registration of the coronary arteries in 3D CTA and 2D X-ray angiography during percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI), in order to present a fused visualization. Methods A novel vesselness-based similarity measure was developed, that avoids an explicit segmentation of the X-ray image. A stochastic optimizer searches the optimal registration using the similarity measure. Results Both simulated data and clinical data were used to investigate the accuracy and capture range of the proposed method. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the iterative closest point method in terms of accuracy (average residual error of 0.42 mm vs. 1.44 mm) and capture range (average 71.1 mm/20.3 degrees vs. 14.1 mm/5.2 degrees). Conclusion The proposed method has proven to be accurate and the capture range is ample for usage in PCI. Especially the absence of an explicit segmentation of the interventionally acquired X-ray images considerably aids the robustness of the method.