Ruler Based Automatic C-Arm Image Stitching Without Overlapping Constraint

Chen, Cheng; Kojcev, Risto; Haschtmann, Daniel; Fekete, Tamas; Nolte, Lutz-Peter; Zheng, Guoyan (2015). Ruler Based Automatic C-Arm Image Stitching Without Overlapping Constraint. Journal of digital imaging, 28(4), pp. 474-480. Springer 10.1007/s10278-014-9763-3

Preview

Text art%3A10.1007%2Fs10278-014-9763-3.pdf - Published Version Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (1MB) | Preview

In this paper, we propose a new method for stitching multiple fluoroscopic images taken by a C-arm instrument. We employ an X-ray radiolucent ruler with numbered graduations while acquiring the images, and the image stitching is based on detecting and matching ruler parts in the images to the corresponding parts of a virtual ruler. To achieve this goal, we first detect the regular spaced graduations on the ruler and the numbers. After graduation labeling, for each image, we have the location and the associated number for every graduation on the ruler. Then, we initialize the panoramic X-ray image with the virtual ruler, and we “paste” each image by aligning the detected ruler part on the original image, to the corresponding part of the virtual ruler on the panoramic image. Our method is based on ruler matching but without the requirement of matching similar feature points in pairwise images, and thus, we do not
necessarily require overlap between the images. We tested our method on eight different datasets of X-ray images, including long bones and a complete spine. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method achieves good results.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

21 since deposited on 05 May 2015
8 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item