Fast 3D medical image rigid registration using the mutual information in equivalent meridian plane

Abstract

Mutual information (MI) technique is an effective similarity measure for the rigid registration of multimodality medical images. However, when the MI methods work with the entire image data, the computation cost is too expensive and are prone to fall into local minima. In this paper, a new concept of equivalent meridian plane (EMP) is proposed, and is determined using principal component analysis (PCA); the rough registrations of EMP is to be realized at six freedom degrees; finally, the refine registrations can be completed using MI in EMP. This method is called as EMP-based MI registration technique, which combines the feature and intensity information. The accuracy and robustness of EMP-MI approach can be verified by applying it to the simulated and real medical image data. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm reduces computational time distinctly and is more robust than transitional MI technology.

Keywords:

• EQUIVALENT MERIDIAN PLANE
• MUTUAL INFORMATION
• IMAGE REGISTRATION
• PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS