Heuristic tree searching for pose-independent 3D/2D rigid registration of vessel structures.

In this study, 3D/2D vascular registration is formulated as a search tree problem on the basis of the topological continuity of vessels and the fact that matching can be decomposed into continuous states. In each node of the tree, a closed-solution of 3D/2D transfor-mation is used to obtain the registration results based on the dense correspondences of vessel points, and the results of match-ing and registration are calculated and recorded. Then, a hand-crafted score that quantifies the qualities of matching and regis-tration of vessels is used, and the remaining problem focuses on finding the highest score in the search tree. An improved heuristic tree search strategy is also proposed to find the best registration. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with four state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on simulated data demon-strate that our method is insensitive to initial pose and robust to noise and deformation. It outperforms other methods in terms of registering real model data and clinical coronary data. In the 3D/2D registration of uninitialized and initialized coronary arter-ies, the average registration errors are 1.85 and 1.79 mm, respec-tively. Given that the proposed method is independent of the ini-tial pose, it can be used for navigating vascular intervention for clinical practice. PMID: 31935699 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research