Medical Image Registration Using Knowledge of Adjacency of Anatomical Structures

The combination of multimodality medical images is generating increasing clinical interest, but the absence of robust automatic registration algorithms is an obstacle to these techniques entering routine clinical use. In this paper we present a new algorithm based on surface fitting that makes use of anatomical knowledge of adjacency of identified anatomical structures to solve the 3D rigid body registration problem. The algorithm has been applied to the registration of MR CT and vascular images of the head, and has achieved accuracies similar to those obtained using interactive location of corresponding landmarks.