Test Platform for Developing New Optical Position Tracking Technology towards Improved Head Motion Correction in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Optical tracking of head pose via fiducial markers has been proven to enable effective correction of motion artifacts in the brain during magnetic resonance imaging but remains difficult to implement in the clinic due to lengthy calibration and set up times. Advances in deep learning for markerless head pose estimation have yet to be applied to this problem because of the sub-millimetre spatial resolution required for motion correction. In the present work, two optical tracking systems are described for the development and training of a neural network: one marker-based system (a testing platform for measuring ground truth head pose) with high tracking fidelity to act as the training labels, and one markerless deep-learning-based system using images of the markerless head as input to the network. The markerless system has the potential to overcome issues of marker occlusion, insufficient rigid attachment of the marker, lengthy calibration times, and unequal performance across degrees of freedom (DOF), all of which hamper the adoption of marker-based solutions in the clinic. Detail is provided on the development of a custom moiré-enhanced fiducial marker for use as ground truth and on the calibration procedure for both optical tracking systems. Additionally, the development of a synthetic head pose dataset is described for the proof of concept and initial pre-training of a simple convolutional neural network. Results indicate that the ground truth system has been sufficiently calibrated and can track head pose with an error of <1 mm and <1°. Tracking data of a healthy, adult participant are shown. Pre-training results show that the average root-mean-squared error across the 6 DOF is 0.13 and 0.36 (mm or degrees) on a head model included and excluded from the training dataset, respectively. Overall, this work indicates excellent feasibility of the deep-learning-based approach and will enable future work in training and testing on a real dataset in the MRI environment.