Medical micro-robot navigation using image processing - blood vessel extraction and X-ray calibration

Abstract

Nowadays, the disease related to blood vessel is significantly increasing day by day. Some conventional methods with surgery knife are not suitable anymore due to their precision considering the tiny size of the blood vessel. On this account, to treat intravascular diseases, controllable wireless micro-robot is developed as a feasible alternative for medical treatment. To guide this kind of a micro-robot, at pre-operative stage, it is necessary to extract the blood vessel and also to create the pathway for the micro-robot. For the fast extraction and visualization of the blood vessel, in this work, the centerline of blood vessel is extracted and used. The procedure is as following. First, Computed Tomography (CT) images of patients are captured and saved as DICOM file. Then, we extracted the center point of the blood vessel in all DICOM slices one by one. Then, the extracted center points are connected as the centerline of the blood vessel. In addition, we also performed on X-ray calibration since it is required to extract the 3D position of the micro-robot using dual X-ray system. This on-going work aims to implement the real-time navigation system for the intravascular micro-robot, and expected to improve the blood vessel extraction speed and its accuracy.