An Image Registration Method for Spine Region in CT Images Considering Sagittal Plane

Abstract

In recent years, the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for supporting to the physician is attracting attention in medical research field. One of them is temporal subtraction technique. It is a technique to generate images emphasizing temporal changes in lesions by performing a differential operation between current and previous image of the same subject. However, there is a problem of mistakenly selecting current and previous slice of a spine region with similar geometry as the same slice because many of the spine regions in axial plane have similar geometries. In this paper, we propose an image registration method for the detection of bone metastases from the spine region by creating a temporal subtraction images from CT images. Especially, we develop an image registration system for spine region considering sagittal plane to accurately select the same slice for the current image and the previous image. In the experiment, we applied the proposed method to CT images of 27 cases with bone metastases and the results were compared with the markings of the lesions.