Robotic Catheter to MRI Scanner Registration

The goal of this work was to develop a robot-to-MRI scanner registration approach, while concurrently addressing the scanner related geometric distortions with the future goal of utilizing this method for interventional robotic procedures under MR image guidance.

Geometric MRI distortion is identified by a custom 3D-grid phantom, where morphological operations are applied to localize control points in the phantom images, which are used to map the distortion. The distortion is modeled and corrected via thin-plate splines.

Robot to MRI scanner registration is performed via a differential, multislice image registration approach utilizing active fiducial coils. Registration is performed by a custom frame, which has a set of embedded electromagnetic coils designed to actively create MRI artifacts. Coils are detected in the scanner coordinate system via background subtraction. Detected coil locations are weighted by the artifact size and registered to the ground truth coil locations in the robot coordinate system via least-squares fitting.

The proposed approach is validated by a set of target coils placed within the workspace, employing multi-planar capabilities of the scanner.

Article

• MRI Distortion Correction and Robot to MRI Scanner Registration for an MRI-Guided Robotic Catheter System
  E. E. Tuna, N.L. Poirot, D. Franson, S. Huang, N. Seiberlich, M. Griswold, and M.C. Cavusoglu
  IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 99205-99220, 2022. [pdf]

• Differential Image Based Robot to MRI Scanner Registration with Active Fiducial Markers for an MRI-Guided Robotic Catheter System
  E. E. Tuna, N.L. Poirot, J. Barrera-Bayona, D. Franson, S. Huang, N. Seiberlich, M. Griswold, and M. C. Cavusoglu
  IEEE/RSJ Int Conf Intell Robots Syst (IROS), 2020, doi.org/10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341043. [pdf]