Automatic 3D registration of lung surfaces in computed tomography scans

Abstract

We developed an automated system that registers chest CT images temporally. Our registration method matches corresponding anatomical landmarks to obtain initial registration parameters. The initial point-to-point registration is then generalized to an iterative surface-tosurface registration method. Our “goodness-of-fit” measure is evaluated at each step in the iterative scheme until the registration performance is sufficient. We applied our method to register the 3D lung surfaces of 10 pairs of chest CT scans and report a promising registration performance.