EFFICIENT AND AUTOMATIC ABDOMINAL IMAGE REGISTRATION BASED ON ACTIVE CONTOUR

Image registration is critical for making diagnostic decision and essential for image-guided surgery. To improve the quality and accuracy of healthcare, efficient registration is highly demanded. However, because of the non-rigid deformations caused by heartbeat and breath, abdominal image registration remains a challenging task. To address these issues, an automatic and elastic registration for abdominal images is proposed. The algorithm is divided into three steps: efficient non-iterative affine registration; elastic motion field extraction based on active contours; elastic registration based on motion field. The validation of the method on monomodality and multimodality abdominal images has demonstrated that the algorithm is reliable and efficient.