Parallax-free long bone X-ray image stitching

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel method to create parallax-free panoramic X-ray images of long bones during surgery by making the C-arm rotate around its X-ray source, relative to the patient's table. In order to ensure that the C-arm motion is a relative pure rotation around its X-ray source, we move the table to compensate for the translational part of the motion based on C-arm pose estimation, for which we employed a Camera Augmented Mobile C-arm system and a visual planar marker pattern. Thus, we are able to produce a parallax-free panoramic X-ray image that preserves the property of linear perspective projection. We additionally implement a method to reduce the error caused by varying intrinsic parameters of C-arm X-ray imaging. The results show that our proposed method can generate a parallax-free panoramic X-ray image, independent of the configuration of bone structures and without the requirement of a fronto-parallel setup or any overlap in the X-ray images. The resulting panoramic images have a negligible difference (below 2 pixels) in the overlap between two consecutive individual X-ray images and have a high visual quality, which promises suitability for intra-operative clinical applications in orthopedic and trauma surgery.