Elastic Model Based Non-Rigid Registration Incorporating Statistical Shape Information

This paper describes a new method of non-rigid registration using the combined power of elastic and statistical shape models. The transformations are constrained to be consistent with a physical model of elasticity to maintain smoothness and continuity. A Bayesian formulation, based on this model, on an intensity similarity measure, and on statistical shape information embedded in corresponding boundary points, is employed to find a more accurate and robust non-rigid registration. A dense set of forces arises from the intensity similarity measure to accommodate complex anatomical details. A sparse set of forces constrains consistency with statistical shape models derived from a training set. A number of experiments were performed on both synthetic and real medical images of the brain and heart to evaluate the approach. It is shown that statistical boundary shape information significantly augments and improves elastic model based non-rigid registration.