Registration of Cardiac SPECT/CT Data Through Weighted Intensity Co-occurrence Priors

The introduction of hybrid scanners has greatly increased the popularity of molecular imaging techniques. Many clinical applications benefit from combining complementary information based on the precise alignment of the two modalities. In case the alignment is inaccurate, then this crucial assumption often made for subsequent processing steps will be violated. However, this violation may not be apparent to the physician. In CT-based attenuation correction (AC) for cardiac SPECT/CT data, critical misalignments between SPECT and CT can lead to spurious perfusion defects. In this work, we focus on increasing the accuracy of rigid volume registration of cardiac SPECT/CT data by using prior knowledge. A new weighting scheme for an intensity co-occurrence prior is introduced to assure accurate and robust alignment in the local heart region. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method out-performs mutual information registration and shows robustness across a selection of learned distributions acquired from 15 different patients.