Vessel Enhancing for a Continuous DSA Method towards Endovascular Interventional Surgery

Recently, research on endovascular interventional surgery (EIS) and robot assisted EIS attracts much attention. However, the main visual navigation method, DSA, cannot provide full time vessel shadow information. It leads to long surgical time and high surgical risk. A vessel shadow enhancing algorithm is proposed for a continuous DSA method during EIS aiming at provide full time visual navigation information. To overcome the lack of X-ray images without injecting contrast during continuous DSA method. A heart-and-breathe-rate based subtracting method is proposed to obtain the subtracted image. The eroding and dilating method are used to denoising the subtracted images. In addition, the threshold method along the raw and column is adopted to further weaken the noise in the images. Experiments are conducted with the X-ray images obtained during clinical angiography using continuous DSA method. The experimental results indicate that the final processed images reach the requirement of surgeon and robot system about full time visual navigation information. the processing speed in the experiments is 1.25fps.