Registration of 4D time-series of cardiac images with multichannel Diffeomorphic Demons

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a generic framework for inter-subject non-linear registration of 4D time-series images. In this framework, spatio-temporal registration is defined by mapping trajectories of physical points as opposed to spatial registration that solely aims at mapping homologous points. First, we determine the trajectories we want to register in each sequence using a motion tracking algorithm based on the Diffeomorphic Demons algorithm. Then, we perform simultaneously pairwise registrations of corresponding time-points with the constraint to map the same physical points over time. We show this trajectory registration can be formulated as a multichannel registration of 3D images. We solve it using the Diffeomorphic Demons algorithm extended to vector-valued 3D images. This framework is applied to the inter-subject non-linear registration of 4D cardiac CT sequences. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.