Catheter Synthesis in X-Ray Fluoroscopy with Generative Adversarial Networks

Accurate localization of catheters or guidewires in fluoroscopy images is important to improve the stability of intervention procedures as well as the development of surgical navigation systems. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to improve performance, however these techniques require extensive pixel-wise annotations. Moreover, the human annotation effort is equally expensive. In this study, we mitigate this labeling effort using generative adversarial networks (cycleGAN) wherein we synthesize realistic catheters in flouroscopy from localized guidewires in camera images whose annotations are cheaper to acquire. Our approach is motivated by the fact that catheters are tubular structures with varying profiles, thus given a guidewire in a camera image, we can obtain the centerline that follows the profile of a catheter in an X-ray image and create plausible X-ray images composited with such a centerline. In order to generate an image similar to the actual X-ray image, we propose a loss term that includes perceptual loss alongside the standard cycle loss. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional GAN and generates images with consistent quality. Further, we provide evidence to the development of methods that leverage such synthetic composite images in supervised settings.