Collaborative tracking for MRI-guided robotic intervention on the beating heart

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-guided robotic interventions for aortic valve repair promise to dramatically reduce time and cost of operations when compared to endoscopically guided (EG) procedures. A challenging issue is real-time and robust tracking of anatomical landmark points. The interventional tool should be constantly adjusted via a closed feedback control loop to avoid harming these points while valve repair is taking place in the beating heart. A Bayesian network of particle filter trackers proves capable to produce real-time, yet robust behavior. The algorithm is extremely flexible and general--more sophisticated behaviors can be produced by simply increasing the cardinality of the tracking network. Experimental results on 16 MRI cine sequences highlight the promise of the method.