Automatic pose initialization for accurate 2D/3D registration applied to abdominal aortic aneurysm endovascular repair

Minimally invasive abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) stenting can be greatly facilitated by overlaying the preoperative 3-D model of the abdominal aorta onto the intra-operative 2-D X-ray images. Accurate 2-D/3-D registration in 3-D space makes the 2-D/3-D overlay robust to the change of C-Arm angulations. By far, the 2-D/3-D registration methods based on simulated X-ray projection images using multiple image planes have been shown to be able to provide satisfactory 3-D registration accuracy. However, one drawback of the intensity-based 2-D/3-D registration methods is that the similarity measure is usually highly non-convex and hence the optimizer can easily be trapped into local minima. User interaction therefore is often needed in the initialization of the position of the 3-D model in order to get a successful 2-D/3-D registration. In this paper, a novel 3-D pose initialization technique is proposed, as an extension of our previously proposed bi-plane 2-D/3-D registration method for AAA intervention [4]. The proposed method detects vessel bifurcation points and spine centerline in both 2-D and 3-D images, and utilizes landmark information to bring the 3-D volume into a 15mm capture range. The proposed landmark detection method was validated on real dataset, and is shown to be able to provide a good initialization for 2-D/3-D registration in [4], thus making the workflow fully automatic.