| abstract |
System and methods for an automatic multimodal real-time tracking of moving instruments for image plane alignment inside a MRI scanner. The used system (1) is suitable for tracking a moving marker, stand alone or fixed on an instrument, a holding system or a body of a subject. It comprises: • - an MRI scanner (2), • - an MRI multi-plane pulse sequence generating means allowing to interactively modify the position and orientation of one or several image planes in real-time, • - one or several external optical sensors (3) with high frame rate, preferably a RGB-D sensor or an other similar camera system like a stereovision systems, • - a multimodal marker (4) comprising at least one MR visible feature and one visual feature able to be tracked by both the MRI scanner (2) and the at least one external optical sensor (3), • - a computer (5) able to process in real-time the images from both MRI and optical sensor in order to fuse the detected marker position and orientation or pose from both modalities, and predict the next image plane position and orientation based on the estimated motion of the moving marker (4), in order to automatically track said marker and automatically align the image planes with respect to the marker, or to a hoding system or body location it is fixed on. |