CycleGAN for Interpretable Online EMT Compensation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CycleGAN-based method for real-time electromagnetic tracking error compensation in minimally invasive procedures, aiming to reduce radiation exposure by improving hybrid navigation accuracy.

Contribution

The study presents a novel online domain translation approach using CycleGANs for interpretable EMT error correction in clinical environments.

Findings

Error reduction across multiple C-arm environments

Generalization to unseen C-arm configurations

Qualitative improvement in EMT accuracy

Abstract

Purpose: Electromagnetic Tracking (EMT) can partially replace X-ray guidance in minimally invasive procedures, reducing radiation in the OR. However, in this hybrid setting, EMT is disturbed by metallic distortion caused by the X-ray device. We plan to make hybrid navigation clinical reality to reduce radiation exposure for patients and surgeons, by compensating EMT error. Methods: Our online compensation strategy exploits cycle-consistent generative adversarial neural networks (CycleGAN). 3D positions are translated from various bedside environments to their bench equivalents. Domain-translated points are fine-tuned to reduce error in the bench domain. We evaluate our compensation approach in a phantom experiment. Results: Since the domain-translation approach maps distorted points to their lab equivalents, predictions are consistent among different C-arm environments. Error is successfully reduced in all evaluation environments. Our qualitative phantom experiment demonstrates that our approach generalizes well to an unseen C-arm environment. Conclusion: Adversarial, cycle-consistent training is an explicable, consistent and thus interpretable approach for online error compensation. Qualitative assessment of EMT error compensation gives a glimpse to the potential of our method for rotational error compensation.