Advanced inside-out tracking approach for real-time combination of MRI and US images in the radio-frequency shielded room using combination markers.

For the real-time fusion of different modalities, a variety of tracking methods are available including the optical, electromagnetic (EM) and image-based tracking. But as a drawback optical tracking suffers from line of sight issues and EM tracking requires the manual referencing for the fusion procedure and is not usable in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) environment. To avoid these issues, we propose a real-time setup containing a camera capable of inside-Out tracking using combined circular markers attached to Ultrasound (US) probe and a suitable platform for automatic overlay of MRI and US image using markers.