Fusion of Biplane Fluoroscopy With Fiber Bragg Grating for 3D Catheter Shape Reconstruction
Mouloud Ourak, Stijn De Buck, Xuan Thao Ha, Omar Al-Ahmad, Kobe Bamps, Joris Ector, Emmanuel Vander Poorten
Abstract
Nowadays, navigating therapeutic catheters takes place under 2D fluoroscopic imaging. This requires considerable training of the clinician and exposes him/her to X-ray radiation. Researchers have increasingly investigated alternative sensing techniques. In this respect, Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG)-based shape sensing is gaining popularity. This letter proposes two approaches to fuse FBG with fluoroscropy, improve the understanding of the 3-dimensional shape while reducing fluoroscopy use. This letter proposes two FBG-fluoroscopy fusion approaches that combine fluoroscopy and FBG measurements. A comparison is performed between 3D shape reconstructions based on biplane fluoroscopy, rigidly fused multi-core FBG and dynamically fused FBG shape reconstruction. To verify the performance of the different approaches experiments were performed with custom made catheter in a CathLab on 3D printed tubes with known ground truth shape. The experiments showed overall acceptable errors for the targeted application with a maximum below 2 mm. The error of shape reconstruction through biplane fluoroscopy, rigid and dynamic fusion were found to be 1.51±0.04 mm, 1.77±0.29 mm and 1.47±0.15 mm, respectively. Thus, FBG-fluoroscopy fusion offers comparable results to fluoroscopy and may substantially reduce the radiation dose through optimal acquisition frequency.