Nonrigid registration of breast MR images using residual complexity similarity measure

Abstract

Elimination of motion artifact in breast MR images is a significant issue in pre-processing step before utilizing images for diagnostic applications. Breast MR Images are affected by slow varying intensity distortions as a result of contrast agent enhancement. Thus a nonrigid registration algorithm considering this effect is needed. Traditional similarity measures such as sum of squared differences and cross correlation, ignore the mentioned distortion. Therefore, efficient registration is not obtained. Residual complexity is a similarity measure that considers spatially varying intensity distortions by maximizing sparseness of the residual image. In this research, the results obtained by applying nonrigid registration based on residual complexity, sum of squared differences and cross correlation similarity measures are demonstrated which show more robustness and accuracy of RC comparing with other similarity measures for breast MR images.