Rigid Slice-To-Volume Medical Image Registration through Markov Random Fields
This addresses a challenging problem in medical imaging for applications like image-guided surgeries and motion correction, but appears incremental as it builds on prior discrete estimation methods.
The paper tackles rigid slice-to-volume medical image registration by formulating it as a discrete labeling problem using Markov Random Fields (MRFs), and reports promising results on a monomodal MRI dataset of a beating heart.
Rigid slice-to-volume registration is a challenging task, which finds application in medical imaging problems like image fusion for image guided surgeries and motion correction for volume reconstruction. It is usually formulated as an optimization problem and solved using standard continuous methods. In this paper, we discuss how this task be formulated as a discrete labeling problem on a graph. Inspired by previous works on discrete estimation of linear transformations using Markov Random Fields (MRFs), we model it using a pairwise MRF, where the nodes are associated to the rigid parameters, and the edges encode the relation between the variables. We compare the performance of the proposed method to a continuous formulation optimized using simplex, and we discuss how it can be used to further improve the accuracy of our approach. Promising results are obtained using a monomodal dataset composed of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of a beating heart.