Development of a 3D visualization system for the cerebral aneurysm coil embolization

In this study, a system has been developed to draw three-dimensional coordinates of a catheter in real time using Unity for cerebral aneurysm coil embolization, which is one of the endovascular treatments. The system detects the tip of a catheter by binarization and delineation from X-ray images taken from two directions (frontal and lateral views) and calculates the tip coordinates of the catheter in the 3D model of blood vessels generated using VTK from DICOM images. In this system, surgeons can more effectively visualize the catheter tip in 3D by using an head-mounted display, a virtual reality device. In the evaluation experiment, we compared the catheter tip detection with conventional methods and found that it was faster and more accurate than conventional methods. Future tasks include accurate positioning of 2D images and 3D models and drawing catheters other than the tip.