Combining B-mode and color flow vessel segmentation for registration of hepatic CT and ultrasound volumes

Multimodal registration of intraoperative ultrasound and preoperative computed tomography imaging is the basis for percutaneous hepatic interventions. Currently, a rigid registration is performed manually by the surgeon using vessel structures and other anatomical landmarks for visual guidance. In this work our approach for intraoperative vessel segmentation from two ultrasound imaging modes, namely B-Mode and color flow mode, is presented. This segmentation is an important step for automation of the intraoperative registration which relies on vessel structures visible in contrast enhanced CT and ultrasound volumes. This paper describes the problems that arise when using B-mode ultrasound for segmentation of vessels and how they can be solved by introducing additional vessel information from color flow imaging. On a total number of 21 patients, our system was applied successfully in 15 cases. For nine randomly chosen patients studied in this paper, our system achieves a 3.45 mm accuracy at points used for registration and 5.01 mm for other landmarks which were not used for the registration process.