Fast Detection and Processing of Arbitrary Contrast Agent Injections in Coronary Angiography and Fluoroscopy
Percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) requires both pre-interventional cine-angiograms showing the contrasted vessel tree over several heart cycles, and live X-ray monitoring (fluoroscopy) during the catheterization. Navigation during the intervention can be facilitated by fusing the automatically synchronized cineangiogram with the interventional images, e.g. by overlaying the synchronized angiogram over the interventional images. Clearly, this fusion should be limited to those frames of the angiogram which show the full contrasted vessel tree. Conversely, if contrast agent appears in the fluoroscopy images, overlay is not required and should be switched off. To these ends, we describe approaches for the detection and processing of contrast agent injections in cardiac X-ray image sequences.