Differential Image Based Robot to MRI Scanner Registration with Active Fiducial Markers for an MRI-Guided Robotic Catheter System

In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guided robotic catheter ablation procedures, reliable tracking of the catheter within the MRI scanner is needed to safely navigate the catheter. This requires accurate registration of the catheter to the scanner. This paper presents a differential, multi-slice image-based registration approach utilizing active fiducial coils. The proposed method would be used to pre-operatively register the MRI image space with the physical catheter space. In the proposed scheme, the registration is performed with the help of a registration frame, which has a set of embedded electromagnetic coils designed to actively create MRI image artifacts. These coils are detected in the MRI scanner's coordinate system by background subtraction. The detected coil locations in each slice are weighted by the artifact size and then registered to known ground truth coil locations in the catheter's coordinate system via least-squares fitting. The proposed approach is validated by using a set of target coils placed withing the workspace, employing multi-planar capabilities of the MRI scanner. The average registration and validation errors are respectively computed as 1.97 mm and 2.49 mm. The multi-slice approach is also compared to the single-slice method and shown to improve registration and validation by respectively 0.45 mm and 0.66 mm.