Medical image registration in image guided surgery: Issues, challenges and research opportunities

Multimodal images of a patient obtained at different time, pre-surgical planning, intra-procedural guidance and visualization, and post-procedural assessment are the core components of image-guided surgery (IGS). In IGS, the goal of registration is to integrate corresponding information in different images of the same organ into a common coordinate system. Registration is a fundamental task in IGS and its main purpose is to provide better visualization and navigation to the surgeons. In this paper, we describe the most popular types of medical image registration and evaluate their prominent state-of-the art issues and challenges in image-guided surgery. We have also presented the factors which affect the accuracy, reliability and efficiency of medical image registration methods. It is not possible to achieve highly successful IGS until all the issues and challenges in registration process are identified and subsequently solved.