A practical multi-modality medical image registration solution / 生物医学工程学杂志

ABSTRACT

In medical imaging field, doctors often complete the intra-subject registration of multi modality images by choosing a pair of anatomic landmarks. It is hard to choose the same landmark accurately in different imaging modality. For multi-modality image registration, mutual information measure is widely used because it suffers little from the difference among different modalities, but it has disadvantages of large amount of calculation and slow converges. In this paper, considering the convenience in practice, we firstly register different modality images by choosing a pair of corresponding landmarks. In order to decrease the error during choosing the landmarks, we further do the registration using mutual information method. The advantage of this solution is that the landmark based registration presents a good starting point for further mutual information (MI) registration, while the MI method decreases the difficulty of choosing landmarks. Experimental results showed that this registration solution was fast, accurate, and would have a good clinical potential application in the future.