Catheter localization in 3D ultrasound using voxel-of-interest-based ConvNets for cardiac intervention

Purpose: Efficient image-based catheter localization in 3D US during cardiac interventions is highly desired, since it facilitates the operation procedure, reduces the patient risk and improves the outcome. Current image-based catheter localization methods are not efficient or accurate enough for real clinical use. Methods: We propose a catheter localization method for 3D cardiac ultrasound (US). The catheter candidate voxels are first pre-selected by the Frangi vesselness filter with adaptive thresholding, after which a triplanar-based ConvNet is applied to classify the remaining voxels as catheter or not. We propose a Share-ConvNet for 3D US, which reduces the computation complexity by sharing a single ConvNet for all orthogonal slices. To boost the performance of ConvNet, we also employ two-stage training with weighted cross-entropy. Using the classified voxels, the catheter is localized by a model fitting algorithm. Results: To validate our method, we have collected challenging ex vivo datasets. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can localize the catheter with an average error of 2.1 mm in around 10 s per volume. Conclusion: Our method can automatically localize the cardiac catheter in challenging 3D cardiac US images. The efficiency and accuracy localization of the proposed method are considered promising for catheter detection and localization during clinical interventions.