Abstract
Nowadays, navigating therapeutic catheters takes place under 2D fluoroscopic imaging. This requires considerable training of the clinician and exposes him/her to X-ray radiation. Researchers have increasingly investigated alternative sensing techniques. In this respect Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG)-based shape sensing is gaining popularity. This paper proposes two approaches to fuse FBG with fluoroscropy, improve the understanding of the 3- dimensional shape while reducing fluoroscopy use. This paper proposes 2 FBG-fluoroscopy fusion approaches that combine fluoroscopy and FBG measurements. A comparison is performed between 3D shape reconstructions based on biplane fluoroscopy, rigidly fused multi-core FBG and dynamically fused FBG shape reconstruction. To verify the performance of the different approaches experiments were performed with custom made catheter in a CathLab on 3D printed tubes with known ground truth shape. The experiments showed overall acceptable errors for the targeted application with a maximum below 2 mm. The error of shape reconstruction through biplane fluoroscopy, rigid and dynamic fusion were found to be 1.51+-0.04 mm, 1.77+-0.29 mm and 1.47+-0.15 mm, respectively. Thus, FBG-fluoroscopy fusion offers comparable results to fluoroscopy and may substantially reduce the radiation dose through optimal acquisition frequency.

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