Model-based Catheter Segmentation in MRI-images
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Accurate and reliable segmentation of catheters in MR-gui- ded interventions remains a challenge, and a step of critical importance in clinical workflows. In this work, under reasonable assumptions, me- chanical model based heuristics guide the segmentation process allows correct catheter identification rates greater than 98 compared to the state of the art. Given distal tips, searching towards the proximal ends of the catheters is guided by mechanical models that are estimated on a per-catheter basis. Their bending characteristics are used to constrain the image fea- ture based candidate points. The final catheter trajectories are hybrid sequences of individual points, each derived from model and image fea- tures. We evaluate the method on a database of 10 patient MRI scans including 101 manually segmented catheters. The mean errors were 1.40 mm and the median errors were 1.05 mm. The number of outliers devi- ating more than 2 mm from the gold standard is 7, and the number of outliers deviating more than 3 mm from the gold standard is just 2.
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