A Real-Time Intrasubject Elastic Registration Algorithm for Dynamic 2-D Ultrasound Images

A new dynamic registration technique is designed to elastically align a sequence of 2-D ultrasound (US) images. The proposed algorithm tracks features over an image sequence in real-time, as opposed to our previous technique which registers images without utilizing prior information. The registration results were evaluated using a customized validation framework for elastic US registration algorithms. Experiments were performed on 600 simulated images as well as 20 image sequences obtained from 10 volunteer subjects, each sequence containing 50 images. Strategies for qualitative and quantitative evaluation consisted of visual assessment, feature overlap, similarity measures, and simulation experiments. The registration method has comparable performance to our previous registration technique; however, has the advantage of lower computational requirements and hence, is potentially more suitable for clinical applications. Rigorous performance evaluations attest to the fast speed of registration at an average of 5.5 frames per second on a conventional computing platform. (E-mail: purang@cs.queensu.ca)