Visual check and automatic compensation for patient movement during image-guided Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) stenting

Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) Stenting is an interventional repair to treat AAA. This procedure heavily relies on interventional imaging technology for navigation and guidance, typically by real time fluoroscopy with contrast medium injection. Recent advances of interventional imaging technology make it possible to register and fuse preoperative volumetric data with the fluoroscopy to provide more detailed visualization. However, the registration can be invalidated by patient movement, and therefore needs to be refined once patient movement happens. The current AAA intervention workflow requires physicians to manually fade in and out the volume rendering to visually check the patient movement, and manually re-register the volumetric data if patient movement is observed. The presented paper proposes a pelvis boundary detection method that enables real time monitoring of patient movement and an automatic 2D/3-D re-registration algorithm that compensates for it. By adding the two proposed components, the AAA intervention workflow becomes more seamless. Experiments on clinical data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.