Local Similarity Measures for ROI-based Registration of DCE-MRI of the Breast

Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) of the breast is widely used for detection and quantification purposes of breast cancer. In this paper, we present an evaluation of three similarity measures for local region of interest registration of small lesions in DCE-MRI. We evaluate the different registration results using a pharmacokinetic model function and compare measured perfusion data to the modelled function values. In addition, we use acquisitions from different time frames (preand post-contrast) as fixed image and observe the influence on the registration quality. The registered images lead to an improvement between 25.9% and 48.8% in terms of fitting quality to the pharmacokinetic model. Improvements could be achieved with all three similarity measures.