Efficient Registration Method Research Articles

An efficient locally affine framework for the smooth registration of anatomical structures

Intra-subject and inter-subject nonlinear registration based on dense transformations requires the setting of many parameters, mainly for regularization. This task is a major issue, as the global quality of the registration will depend on it. Setting these parameters is, however, very hard, and they may have to be tuned for each patient when processing data acquired by different centers or using different protocols. Thus, we present in this article a method to introduce more coherence in the registration by using fewer degrees of freedom than with a dense registration. This is done by registering the images only on user-defined areas, using a set of affine transformations, which are optimized together in a very efficient manner. Our framework also ensures a smooth and coherent transformation thanks to a new regularization of the affine components. Finally, we ensure an invertible transformation thanks to the Log-Euclidean polyaffine framework. This allows us to get a more robust and very efficient registration method, while obtaining good results as explained below. We performed a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the obtained results on two applications: first on atlas-based brain segmentation, comparing our results with a dense registration algorithm. Then the second application for which our framework is particularly well suited concerns bone registration in the lower-abdomen area. We obtain in this case a better positioning of the femoral heads than with a dense registration. For both applications, we show a significant improvement in computation time, which is crucial for clinical applications.

GRID-ENABLED NON-RIGID REGISTRATION OF MEDICAL IMAGES

Over recent years, non-rigid registration has become a major issue in medical imaging. It consists in recovering a dense point-to-point correspondence field between two images, and usually takes a long time. This is in contrast to the needs of a clinical environment, where usability and speed are major constraints, leading to the necessity of reducing the computation time from slightly less than an hour to just a few minutes. As financial pressure makes it hard for healthcare organizations to invest in expensive high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, cluster computing proves to be a convenient solution to our computation needs, offering a large processing power at a low cost. Among the fast and efficient non-rigid registration methods, we chose the demons algorithm for its simplicity and good performances. The parallel implementation decomposes the correspondence field into spatial blocks, each block being assigned to a node of the cluster. We obtained an acceleration of 11 by using 15 2GHz PC's connected through a 1GB/s Ethernet network and reduced the computation time from 40min to 3min30. In order to further optimize the costs and the maintenance load, we investigate in the second part the transparent use of shared computing resources, either through a graphic client or a Web one.

An automatic seal imprint verification approach

The automatic verification of seal imprints is a difficult pattern recognition problem and has a lot of applications in the oriental countries. Several approaches have been proposed in the past 10 years, but all of them were hard to implement in practice because of their drawbacks in the adaptability, reliability and practicality. In this paper, a new automatic seal imprint verification approach is presented. Due to the efficient and accurate registration method, a set of effective features and the elaborate implementations, this approach has satisfied most practical requirements and has been used for a practical check verification system in a Chinese bank.