Fluoroscopic Shape and Pose Tracking of Catheters with Custom Radiopaque Markers

--Safe navigation of steerable and robotic catheters in the cerebral vasculature requires awareness of the catheter's shape and pose. Currently, a significant perception burden is placed on interventionalists to mentally reconstruct and predict catheter motions from biplane fluoroscopy images. Efforts to track these catheters are limited to planar segmentation or bulky sensing instrumentation, which are incompatible with microcatheters used in neurointervention. In this work, a catheter is equipped with custom radiopaque markers arranged to enable simultaneous shape and pose estimation under biplane fluoroscopy. A design measure is proposed to guide the arrangement of these markers to minimize sensitivity to marker tracking uncertainty. Endovascular neurosurgery is a rapidly growing domain which enables treatment of cerebrovascular disease with minimally-invasive approaches. Among the most common endovascular neurointerventions include aneurysm coiling and mechanical thrombectomy (MT), which has become the gold standard for treating strokes caused by large vessel occlusions (L VOs).