Automatic detection of multiple and overlapping EP catheters in fluoroscopic sequences

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering
• Interventional Cardiology

Background:

• Electrophysiology (EP) catheter navigation is crucial in diagnosing and treating cardiac arrhythmias.
• Accurate real-time visualization of EP catheters during fluoroscopy is essential for procedural safety and efficacy.
• Manual or semi-automatic methods for catheter tracking can be time-consuming and prone to error.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a fully automatic method for detecting electrophysiology (EP) catheters in fluoroscopic image sequences.
• To enable simultaneous detection of multiple catheters without requiring initialization.
• To improve the accuracy and efficiency of catheter localization in X-ray imaging.

Main Methods:

• Utilized blob detectors and clustering algorithms to identify all catheter electrodes within X-ray images.
• Developed an initialization-free approach for robust catheter detection.
• Algorithm designed to handle overlapping electrodes and varying catheter numbers.

Main Results:

• Validated the method on 1422 fluoroscopic images.
• Achieved a high tip detection rate of 99.3%.
• Demonstrated a mean distance of 0.5mm from manually labeled ground truth centroids for all detected electrodes.

Conclusions:

• The proposed automatic EP catheter detection method is highly accurate and reliable.
• This technique offers a significant advancement for real-time guidance in electrophysiology procedures.
• The initialization-free and multi-catheter detection capabilities enhance its clinical applicability.