Automatic detection of contrast injection on fluoroscopy and angiography for image guided trans-catheter aortic valve implantations (TAVI)

Presentation of detailed anatomical structures via 3-D models helps navigation and deployment of the prosthetic valve in TAVI procedures. Fast and automatic contrast detection in the aortic root on X-ray images facilitates a seamless workflow to utilize the 3-D models by triggering 2-D/3-D registration automatically when motion compensation is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatic detection of contrast injection in the aortic root on fluoroscopic and angiographic sequences. The proposed method is based on histogram analysis and likelihood ratio test, and is robust to variations in the background, the density and volume of the injected contrast, and the size of the aorta. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated on 26 sequences from 5 patients and 3 clinical sites, with 16 out of 17 contrast injections correctly detected and zero false detections. The proposed method is of general form and can be extended for detection of contrast injection in other organs and/or applications.