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Dr.-Ing. Matthias Weidler

Alumnus of the Pattern Recognition Lab of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Registration of 3-D heart volumes to 2-D fluoroscopy images

  • Cardiac ablation is a treatment option for atrial fibrillation which is the most common heart arrhythmia. It is done using catheters, usually under fluoroscopic guidance. While the catheters can be clearly seen in the fluoroscopic images, the heart remains invisible in the X-ray images. However, knowing the position of the catheters inside the heart is crucial. To highlight the heart structure, the physician injects contrast agent. Also an overlay showing the patient's heart can be displayed together with the fluoroscopic images.


    Registration of the 3-D heart volume to 2-D fluoroscopic images is needed as the patients position during the acquisition of the heart model and the position during the intervention differ. To avoid time consuming manual registration we develop automatic approaches to perform this registration.

Catheter Detection and Reconstruction

  • Electro-physilolgy (EP) procedures are used for treatment of heart arrhythmias. They are done minimally invasive using fluoroscopic guidance. As a single X-ray image does not provide depth information, biplane systems can be used to acquire simultaneously images from two different directions. So, the physician can mentally derive the 3-D shape of the catheters. This, however, requires much experience.

    Basically, a 3-D shape of a object can be computed from two views if point correspondences are known. Manual annotation of these correspondences is time consuming. Therefore, we develop approaches to automatically detect and reconstruct catheters.