Abstract
The goal is to create an assistant for ultrasound- guided femoral nerve block. By segmenting and visualizing the important structures such as the femoral artery, we hope to improve the success of these procedures. This article is the first step towards this goal and presents novel real-time methods for identifying and reconstructing the femoral artery, and registering a model of the surrounding anatomy to the ultrasound images. The femoral artery is modelled as an ellipse. The artery is first detected by a novel algorithm which initializes the artery tracking. This algorithm is completely automatic and requires no user interaction. Artery tracking is achieved with a Kalman filter. The 3D artery is reconstructed in real-time with a novel algorithm and a tracked ultrasound probe. A mesh model of the surrounding anatomy was created from a CT dataset. Registration of this model is achieved by landmark registration using the centerpoints from the artery tracking and the femoral artery centerline of the model. The artery detection method was able to automatically detect the femoral artery and initialize the tracking in all 48 ultrasound sequences. The tracking algorithm achieved an average dice similarity coefficient of 0.91, absolute distance of 0.33 mm, and Hausdorff distance 1.05 mm. The mean registration error was 2.7 mm, while the average maximum error was 12.4 mm. The average runtime was measured to be 38, 8, 46 and 0.2 milliseconds for the artery detection, tracking, reconstruction and registration methods respectively.
Highlights
T HE use of regional anaesthesia (RA) is increasing due to the benefits over general anaesthesia (GA) such as reduced morbidity and mortality [27], [5], [35], reduced postop
Without the requirement that the artery must be detected at a similar location in five consecutive frames
Due to the requirement that the artery must be detected at a similar location in five consecutive frames this did not lead to an incorrect initialization
Summary
T HE use of regional anaesthesia (RA) is increasing due to the benefits over general anaesthesia (GA) such as reduced morbidity and mortality [27], [5], [35], reduced postop-. Manuscript received August 19, 2015; revised October 19, 2015; accepted October 20, 2015. Date of publication October 26, 2015; date of current version March 01, 2016. F. Lindseth is with the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and SINTEF Medical Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
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