Registration of 3D medical images using simple morphological tools

Abstract

Multimodal medical images are often of too different a nature to be registered on the basis of the image grey values only. It is the purpose of this paper to construct operators that extract similar structures from these images that will enable registration by simple grey value based methods, such as maximization of cross-correlation. These operators can be constructed using only basic morphological tools such as erosion and dilation. Simple versions of these operators are easily implemented on any computer system. We will show that accurate registration of images of various modalities (MR, CT, SPECT and PET) can be obtained using this approach.