Chapter 10 - Synthesis for image analysis across modalities

Abstract

Inter-modality imaging problems are ubiquitous in medical imaging. The acquisition of multiple modalities – or different variations of the same modality – is frequent in many clinical applications and research problems. Inter-modality image analysis techniques have been developed to cope with the differences between modalities, but they do not always perform as well as their intra-modality counterparts. Image synthesis can be used to bridge this gap, by making one of the two modalities resemble the other, and using intra-modality methods. It is often the case that the error in the synthesis is outweighed by the improvement in performance given by switching from intra- to inter-modality analysis. In this chapter, we present a survey of methods based on this idea, with a focus on two of the most representative problems in medical image analysis, registration and segmentation.