You can connect Slicer to a C-arm in several ways.
- Capture video output
You can connect a framegrabber to your computer and capture images from the C-arm’s video output. Analog output, such as S-video will be somewhat noisy and it may be lower resolution than the native resolution of the fluoro.
You don’t have direct access to the C-arm’s pose, so you either need to attach an accelerometer or have a special marker object (such as FTRAC) in the field of view. For us, accelerometers (in IMU/MARG sensors) were more accurate and much easier to work with overall, the only disadvantage is that they only provide orientation, and not position. You can also use optical trackers, surface scanners, etc. to get relative pose between C-arm and patient. Running OCR on the acquired image may work, too, but it is very specific to the C-arm software and may be quite fragile.
You can connect to various types of framegrabbers, accelerometers, optical trackers, surface scanners using Plus toolkit, which can send the data in real-time to Slicer.
- Automated DICOM push
You can set up your C-arm to automatically push acquired image sequences or snapshot to a DICOM C-store storage server. If you enable DICOM C-store SCP in Slicer and set it as destination server for auto-push in your C-arm then Slicer receives all acquired images within a few seconds and it shows up in the DICOM database from where you can load it into the scene.
The advantage is that you can get much higher image quality than via analog video and metadata in the DICOM header, such as the C-arm angle, SID, SOD, etc.