Multi-phase Deformable Registration for Time-dependent Abdominal Organ Variations
This addresses the challenge of visually checking the same area in medical imaging for tumor detection, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing registration methods for specific abdominal motions.
The paper tackled the problem of aligning multi-phase CT scans of abdominal organs, which have complex time-dependent motions, by proposing a deformable registration algorithm that achieved a registration accuracy of 0.85 +/- 0.45mm for the pancreas within 1 minute.
Human body is a complex dynamic system composed of various sub-dynamic parts. Especially, thoracic and abdominal organs have complex internal shape variations with different frequencies by various reasons such as respiration with fast motion and peristalsis with slower motion. CT protocols for abdominal lesions are multi-phase scans for various tumor detection to use different vascular contrast, however, they are not aligned well enough to visually check the same area. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient and accurate deformable registration algorithm for multi-phase CT scans considering abdominal organ motions, which can be applied for differentiable or non-differentiable motions of abdominal organs. Experimental results shows the registration accuracy as 0.85 +/- 0.45mm (mean +/- STD) for pancreas within 1 minute for the whole abdominal region.