General purpose medical image registration.

Abstract

We have developed a general-purpose registration algorithm for medical images and volumes. The transformation between images is modeled as locally affine but globally smooth, and explicitly accounts for local and global variations in image intensities. An explicit model for missing data is also incorporated, allowing us to simultaneously segment and register images with partial or missing data. The algorithm is built upon a differential multiscale framework and incorporates the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. We show that this approach is highly effective in registering a range of clinical medical images.