Rigid medical image registration using PCA neural network

Medical image registration plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and therapy planning. This paper proposes an automatic method to register computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) brain images by using first principal directions of feature images. In this method, principal component analysis (PCA) neural network is used to calculate the first principal directions from feature images, then the registration is accomplished by simply aligning feature images’ first principal directions and centroids. Simulations for MR–MR (MR and MR images) registration and CT–MR (CT and MR images) registration are carried out to illustrate the method.