An Active Contour Method for Bone Cement Reconstruction From C-Arm X-Ray Images

• Published in: IEEE transactions on medical imaging Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 860 - 869
• Main Authors: Lucas, B. C., Otake, Y., Armand, M., Taylor, R. H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.04.2012
• Subjects: Active contour; Algorithms; bone cement; Bone Cements; Bones; Computed tomography; deformable models; Femur - diagnostic imaging; Humans; Image reconstruction; Image segmentation; intra-operative imaging; Materials; Models, Biological; Phantoms, Imaging; Radiographic Image Enhancement - methods; reconstruction; segmentation; Three dimensional displays; X-ray imaging
• ISSN: 0278-0062; 1558-254X
• DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2011.2171498

A novel algorithm is presented to segment and reconstruct injected bone cement from a sparse set of X-ray images acquired at arbitrary poses. The sparse X-ray multi-view active contour (SxMAC-pronounced "smack") can 1) reconstruct objects for which the background partially occludes the object in X-ray images, 2) use X-ray images acquired on a noncircular trajectory, and 3) incorporate prior computed tomography (CT) information. The algorithm's inputs are preprocessed X-ray images, their associated pose information, and prior CT, if available. The algorithm initiates automated reconstruction using visual hull computation from a sparse number of X-ray images. It then improves the accuracy of the reconstruction by optimizing a geodesic active contour. Experiments with mathematical phantoms demonstrate improvements over a conventional silhouette based approach, and a cadaver experiment demonstrates SxMAC's ability to reconstruct high contrast bone cement that has been injected into a femur and achieve sub-millimeter accuracy with four images.