A study on medical image registration by mutual information with pyramid data structure

The registration method based on mutual information is currently a popular technique for medical image registration, but the computation of the mutual information is complex and the registration speed is slow. In this work, a new slice accumulation pyramid (SAP) data structure was proposed to expedite the registration process. A numerical comparative study between the new data structure and the existing wavelet pyramid (WP) data structure was given, and the results confirmed that the new pyramid data structure was superior to the WP in both the calculation efficiency and the optimizing performance. Finally, SAP was applied to remove the artifacts between CT and MRI data sets, and the results showed the validation of SAP to registration of mulmodality images.