A Slice Based Technique for Low-Complexity 3D/2D Registration of CT to Single Plane X-Ray Fluoroscopy

The registration of 3D CT volumes to 2D fluoroscopy video frames has been used in a number of important medical applications such as image guided surgery and kinematic analysis of joints. A major limitation for this type of registration is the computational complexity of the algorithms required to perform the registration. These algorithms present a significant computational burden since they are iterative in nature and a new 3D CT volume must be calculated at every iteration. In this paper we propose a new fast single-plane 3D/2D image registration algorithm which only updates partial 3D data for some of the iterations instead of updating the full 3D volume at every iteration. Experimental results show that our algorithm can perform the 3D/2D registration 10 times faster than conventional approaches with no significant loss of accuracy or reduction in successful registration rate.