Reconstruction method for curvilinear structures from two views

Minimally invasive interventions often involve tools of curvilinear shape like catheters and guide-wires. If the camera parameters of a fluoroscopic system or a stereoscopic endoscope are known, a 3-D reconstruction of corresponding points can be computed by triangulation. Manual identification of point correspondences is time consuming, but there exist methods that automatically select corresponding points along curvilinear structures. The focus here is on the evaluation of a recent published method for catheter reconstruction from two views. A previous evaluation of this method using clinical data yielded promising results. For that evaluation, however, no 3-D ground truth data was available such that the error could only be estimated using the forward-projection of the reconstruction. In this paper, we present a more extensive evaluation of this method based on both clinical and phantom data. For the evaluation using clinical images, 36 data sets and two different catheters were available. The mean error found when reconstructing both catheters was 0.1 mm +/- 0.1 mm. To evaluate the error in 3-D, images of a phantom were acquired from 13 different angulations. For the phantom, A 3D C-arm CT voxel data set of the phantom was also available. A reconstruction error was calculated by comparing the triangulated 3D reconstruction result to the 3D voxel data set. The evaluation yielded an average error of 1.2 mm +/- 1.2 mm for the circumferential mapping catheter and 1.3 mm +/- 1.0 mm for the ablation catheter.