Abstract
The term “registration” has been used to refer to establishing pixel correspondence between two images in medical image analysis. In computer-integrated surgical system such as surgical navigation and surgical robot, it refers to compute relative transformation between coordinate systems such as a local coordinate system defined in patient space and a global coordinate system defined in the operating room. Both applications share the same theoretical background except that the registration of image (i.e., a cluster of intensity values on the integer lattice) involves interpolation, because the transformed point does not lie exactly on the integer lattice. Due to the difference in the application area, the two registrations are rarely explained with a unified terminology. In this article, we overview the common elemental tools in registration, i.e., transformation function, similarity function and optimization method, with the emphasis on the comparison between the two applications, and we also describe the future perspective of the research field.
