Non-Rigid Ultrasound Image Registration Based on Intensity and Local Phase Information

A non-rigid ultrasound image registration method is proposed in this work using the intensity as well as the local phase information under a variational framework. One application of this technique is to register two consecutive images in an ultrasound image sequence. Although intensity is the most widely used This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Korea, under the Home Network Research Center–Information Technology Research Center support program supervised by the Institute of Information Technology Assessment. J. Woo · C.-C. Jay Kuo Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA J. Woo e-mail: [email protected] C.-C. Jay Kuo e-mail: [email protected] B.-W. Hong (B) School of Computer Science and Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 156-756, Korea e-mail: [email protected] C.-H. Hu · K. K. Shung Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1451, USA C.-H. Hu e-mail: [email protected] K. K. Shung e-mail: [email protected] P. J. Slomka Department of Imaging, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] feature in traditional ultrasound image registration algorithms, speckle noise and lower image resolution make the registration process difficult. By integrating the intensity and the local phase information, we can find and track the non-rigid transformation of each pixel under diffeomorphism between the source and target images. Experiments using synthetic and cardiac images of in vivo mice and human subjects are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.