Efficient 3D-3D vascular registration based on multiple orthogonal 2D projections

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new and efficient multi-modal 3D-3D vascular registration algorithm, which transforms the 3D-3D registration problem into a multiple 2D-3D vascular registration problem. Along each orthogonal axis, projected 2D image from a segmented binary 3D floating volume is compared with maximum intensity projection (MIP) image of the reference volume. At the preprocessing stage of the floating image volume, vessels are segmented and represented by a number of spheres with centers located at the skeleton points of the vessels and radii equal to the distance from the skeleton points to their closest boundary. To generate projected images from the binary 3D volume, instead of using the conventional ray-casting technique, the spheres are projected to the three orthogonal projection planes. The discrepancy between the projected image and the reference MIP image is measured by a relatively simple similarity measure, sum of squared differences (SSD). By visual comparison, we found that the performances of our method and the Mutual Information (MI)-based method are visually comparable. Moreover, based on the experimental results, our method for 3D-3D vascular registration is more computationally efficient than the MI-based method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.