Self-Aligning Manifolds for Matching Disparate Medical Image Datasets.

Manifold alignment can be used to reduce the dimensionality of multiple medical image datasets into a single globally consistent low-dimensional space. This may be desirable in a wide variety of problems, from fusion of different imaging modalities for Alzheimer's disease classification to 4DMR reconstruction from 2D MR slices. Unfortunately, most existing manifold alignment techniques require either a set of prior correspondences or comparability between the datasets in high-dimensional space, which is often not possible. We propose a novel technique for the 'self-alignment' of manifolds (SAM) from multiple dissimilar imaging datasets without prior correspondences or inter-dataset image comparisons. We quantitatively evaluate the method on 4DMR reconstruction from realistic, synthetic sagittal 2D MR slices from 6 volunteers and real data from 4 volunteers. Additionally, we demonstrate the technique for the compounding of two free breathing 3D ultrasound views from one volunteer. The proposed method performs significantly better for 4DMR reconstruction than state-of-the-art image-based techniques.

Clinical evaluation of respiratory motion compensation for anatomical roadmap guided cardiac electrophysiology procedures.

X-ray fluoroscopically guided cardiac electrophysiological procedures are routinely carried out for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. X-ray images have poor soft tissue contrast and, for this reason, overlay of static 3-D roadmaps derived from preprocedural volumetric data can be used to add anatomical information. However, the registration between the 3-D roadmap and the 2-D X-ray image can be compromised by patient respiratory motion. Three methods were designed and evaluated to correct for respiratory motion using features in the 2-D X-ray images. The first method is based on tracking either the diaphragm or the heart border using the image intensity in a region of interest. The second method detects the tracheal bifurcation using the generalized Hough transform and a 3-D model derived from 3-D preoperative volumetric data. The third method is based on tracking the coronary sinus (CS) catheter. This method uses blob detection to find all possible catheter electrodes in the X-ray image. A cost function is applied to select one CS catheter from all catheter-like objects. All three methods were applied to X-ray images from 18 patients undergoing radiofrequency ablation for the treatment of atrial fibrillation. The 2-D target registration errors (TRE) at the pulmonary veins were calculated to validate the methods. A TRE of 1.6 mm ± 0.8 mm was achieved for the diaphragm tracking; 1.7 mm ± 0.9 mm for heart border tracking, 1.9 mm ± 1.0 mm for trachea tracking, and 1.8 mm ± 0.9 mm for CS catheter tracking. We present a comprehensive comparison between the techniques in terms of robustness, as computed by tracking errors, and accuracy, as computed by TRE using two independent approaches.

Real-time respiratory motion correction for cardiac electrophysiology procedures using image-based coronary sinus catheter tracking.

X-ray fluoroscopically guided cardiac electrophysiological procedures are routinely carried out for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. X-ray images have poor soft tissue contrast and, for this reason, overlay of static 3D roadmaps derived from pre-procedural volumetric data can be used to add anatomical information. However, the registration between the 3D roadmap and the 2D X-ray data can be compromised by patient respiratory motion. We propose a novel method to correct for respiratory motion using real-time image-based coronary sinus (CS) catheter tracking. The first step of the proposed technique is to use a blob detection method to detect all possible catheter electrodes in the Xray data. We then compute a cost function to select one CS catheter from all catheter-like objects. For correcting respiratory motion, we apply a low pass filter to the 2D motion of the CS catheter and update the 3D roadmap using this filtered motion. We tested our CS catheter tracking method on 1048 fluoroscopy frames from 15 patients and achieved a success rate of 99.3% and an average 2D tracking error of 0.4 mm +/- 0.2 mm. We also validated our respiratory motion correction strategy by computing the 2D target registration error (TRE) at the pulmonary veins and achieved a TRE of 1.6 mm +/- 0.9 mm.