title: Non-rigid image registration with uniform spherical structure patterns.
abstract: Non-rigid image registration is a challenging task in medical image analysis. In recent years, there are two essential issues. First, intensity similarity is not necessarily equivalent to anatomical similarity when the anatomical correspondences between subject and template images are established. Second, the registration algorithm should be robust against monotonic gray-level transformation when aligning anatomical structures in the presence of bias fields. In this paper, a new feature based non-rigid registration method is proposed to deal with these two problems. The proposed method is based on a new type of image feature, called Uniform Spherical Structure Pattern (USSP). USSP encodes voxel-wise interaction information and geometric properties of anatomical structures. It is computationally efficient, rotation invariant and theoretically monotonic gray-level transformation invariant. The USSP feature is integrated with the Markov random field (MRF) discrete labeling framework to define energy function for registration in this paper. If the segmentation results are available, explicit anatomical correspondence can be established as an additional energy term. The energy function is optimized via the alpha-expansion algorithms. The proposed method is compared with three widely used non-rigid registration methods on both simulated and real databases obtained from BrainWeb and IBSR. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the highest registration accuracy among all the compared methods.
authors.affiliation: Lo Kwee-Seong Medical Image Analysis Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong. liaoshu@cse.ust.hk
authors.forename: Shu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.forename: Albert C S
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Chung
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique