Towards 2D/3D Registration of the Preoperative MRI to Intraoperative Fluoroscopic Images for Visualisation or Bone Defects

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging modality that allows for the evaluation of soft-tissue diseases and the assessment of bone quality. Preoperative MRI volumes are used by surgeons to identify defected bones, perform the segmentation of lesions, and generate surgical plans before the surgery. Nevertheless, conventional intraoperative imaging modalities such as fluoroscopy are less sensitive in detecting potential lesions. In this work, we propose a 2D/3D registration pipeline that aims to register preoperative MRI with intraoperative 2D fluoroscopic images. To showcase the feasibility of our approach, we use the core decompression procedure as a surgical example to perform 2D/3D femur registration. The proposed registration pipeline is evaluated using digitally reconstructed radio-graphs (DRRs) to simulate the intraoperative fluoroscopic images. The resulting transformation from the registration is later used to create overlays of preoperative MRI annotations and planning data to provide intraoperative visual guidance to surgeons. Our results suggest that the proposed registration pipeline is capable of achieving reasonable transformation between MRI and digitally reconstructed fluoroscopic images for intraoperative visualisation applications.