3-D Model-Based Catheter Tracking for Motion Compensation in EP Procedures

Atrial fibrillation is the most common sustained heart arrhythmia and a leading cause of stroke. Its treatment by radio-frequency catheter ablation, performed using fluoroscopic image guidance, is gaining increasingly more importance. Two-dimensional fluoroscopic navigation can take advantage of overlay images derived from pre-operative 3-D data to add anatomical details otherwise not visible under X-ray. Unfortunately, respiratory motion may impair the utility of these static overlay images for catheter navigation. We developed an approach for image-based 3-D motion compensation as a solution to this problem. A bi-plane C-arm system is used to take X-ray images of a special circumferential mapping catheter from two directions. In the first step of the method, a 3-D model of the device is reconstructed. Three-dimensional respiratory motion at the site of ablation is then estimated by tracking the reconstructed catheter model in 3-D. This step involves bi-plane fluoroscopy and 2-D/3-D registration. Phantom data and clinical data were used to assess our model-based catheter tracking method. Experiments involving a moving heart phantom yielded an average 2-D tracking error of 1.4 mm and an average 3-D tracking error of 1.1 mm. Our evaluation of clinical data sets comprised 469 bi-plane fluoroscopy frames (938 monoplane fluoroscopy frames). We observed an average 2-D tracking error of 1.0 mm +/- 0.4 mm and an average 3-D tracking error of 0.8 mm +/- 0.5 mm. These results demonstrate that model-based motion-compensation based on 2-D/3-D registration is both feasible and accurate.