3D Non-Rigid Registration for Abdominal PET-CT and MR Images Using Mutual Information and Independent Component Analysis

The aim of this study is to develop a 3D registration algorithm for positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images acquired from independent PET/CT and MR imaging systems. Combined PET/CT images provide anatomic and functional information, and MR images have high resolution for soft tissue. With the registration technique, the strengths of each modality image can be combined to achieve higher performance in diagnosis and radiotherapy planning. The proposed method consists of two stages: normalized mutual information (NMI)-based global matching and independent component analysis (ICA)based refinement. In global matching, the field of view of the CT and MR images are adjusted to the same size in the preprocessing step. Then, the target image is geometrically transformed, and the similarities between the two images are measured with NMI. The optimization step updates the transformation parameters to efficiently find the best matched parameter set. In the refinement stage, ICA planes from the windowed image slices are extracted and the similarity between the images is measured to determine the transformation parameters of the control points. B-spline– based freeform deformation is performed for the geometric transformation. The results show good agreement between PET/CT and MR images.