Diagnosis - A Global Alignment and Fusion Medical System

In this paper, a global registration-fusion system of medical data is presented in detail. The system is comprised by the following basic subsystems: (1) the multimodal medical image archiving and communication subsystem, (2) the image processing subsystem, and (3) the multimodal registration and fusion subsystem. The system offers various capabilities such as storage, retrieval, distribution and presentation of images from different medical modalities in DICOM format, supports multiple examinations of a patient and uses parallel processing threads to perform the processing of the acquired three-dimensional (3D) data in almost real time. The paper discusses the basic features of the proposed system, analyzes the proposed algorithms for image preprocessing, registration and fusion and presents the results of an experimental study that was carried out for evaluating its performance. The innovation of the proposed work is multilayered. It provides automatic matching based on both segmented surfaces and on different levels of gray and it allows comparison of registration accuracy for the different techniques based on specific criteria to quantify registration. Finally, it improves the registration when there is movement and / or distortion in the data collection of the patient from different imaging systems.