Automated 3-D registration of MR and CT images of the head

This paper discusses the application of voxel similarity measures in the automated registration of clinically acquired MR and CT data of the head. We describe a novel single-start multi-resolution approach to the optimization of these measures, and the issues involved in applying this to data having a range of different fields of view and sampling resolution. We compare four proposed measures of voxel similarity using the same optimization scheme when presented with 10 pairs of images with a range of initial misregistrations. The registration estimates are compared with those provided by manual point-based registration and evaluated by visual inspection to give an assessment of the robustness and accuracy of the different measures. One full-volume CT image set is used to investigate the performance of each measure when used to align truncated images from different regions in the head. The soft tissue correlation and mutual information measures were found to provide the most robust measures of misregistration, providing results comparable to or better than those from manual point-based registration for all but the most truncated image volumes.