A Fast Medical 3D Image Registration Method Based on a Parametric Representation

Abstract

Three dimensional medical image registration is a fundamental technique which applied various medical treatments such as image diagnosis, treatment planning, image guided surgery, etc. In radiation therapy for cancer treatment, quick alignment method around target lesion is required. To align CT images, similarity measurement like normalized cross correlation or mutual information should be calculated. The computational cost must reduce for achieving the online image registration.
In this paper, we propose a novel quick rigid registration method which makes it possible to align the three dimensional images using the parametric eigenspace method. By projecting each CT slice image into the eigenspace as a set of low dimensional vectors, image similarity can be calculated very rapidly. The experiments using CT images of the same patient, it is found that the alignment accuracy is almost the same as the method using normalized cross correlation, and the computation time is less than one second.