Registration and fusion of contrast-enhanced MRI myocardial substrate maps and X-ray angiograms

The aim of this work is to provide the necessary methods to register and fuse the endo-epicardial signal intensity (SI) maps extracted from contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (ceMRl) with X-ray coronary angiograms using an intrinsic registration-based algorithm to help pre-planning and guidance of catheterization procedures. Fusion of angiograms with SI maps was treated as a 2D-3D pose estimation, where each image point is projected to a Plucker line, and the screw representation for rigid motions is minimized using a gradient descent method The resultant transformation is applied to the SI map that is then projected and fused on each angiogram. The proposed method was tested in clinical datasets from 6 patients with prior myocardial infarction. The registration procedure is optionally combined with an iterative closest point algorithm (ICP) that aligns the ventricular contours segmented from two ventriculograms.