Simulation of Intra-operative 3D Coronary Angiography for Enhanced Minimally Invasive Robotic Cardiac Intervention

A simulation environment has been developed to aid the development of three-dimensional (3D) angiographic imaging of the coronary arteries for use during minimally invasive robotic cardiac surgery. We have previously developed a dynamic model of the coronary arteries by non-linearly deforming a high-resolution 3D image of the coronaries of an excised human heart, based on motion information from cine bi-plane angiograms. The result was a sequence of volumetric images representing the motion of the coronary arteries throughout the cardiac cycle. To simulate different acquisition and gating strategies, we implemented an algorithm to forward project through the volume data sets. Thus, radiographic projections corresponding to any view-angle, can be produced for any time-point throughout the cardiac cycle. Combining re-projections from selected time-points and view angles enables the evaluation of various gating strategies. This approach will allow us to determine the optimum image acquisition parameters to produce 3D coronary angiograms for planning and guidance of minimally invasive robotic cardiac surgery.