Reconstruction of 3D Catheter Paths from 2D X-Ray Projections

The diagnosis and therapy of intensive care patients requires the usage of several catheters inside the patients chest. The information about the position and path of the catheters inside the patients body is important for the doctor, but is nowadays not part of the clinical routine. One possible source of this information are CT or NMR scans, which lead to an organizational overhead and additional stress for the intensive care patient. To minimize the overhead we implemented an algorithm to extract the 3D path of catheters in the body of the patient from two or more standard X-ray images. The approach is based on only few assumptions, runs completely in three dimensions, and uses the Xray images only as a guideline for the path reconstruction process. It shows an inherently robust behaviour against misleading structures in the X-ray images, like loops and intersections. The algorithm has been tested with a selection of test images, including images from the clinical routine.