Focused atlas-based image registration for recognition

Registration with an atlas is a method to recognize and label structures that is used especially for the analysis of medical images. Its application to images containing many objects, such as images of the human abdomen, may prove to be very challenging. The underlying idea of our approach is to follow a strategy that resembles commonsense problem solving - goal-directed, context-based and focused. In our method, the goal of recognizing a particular anatomical structure, such as the aorta, is achieved by following a plan, which is a sequence of image registration tasks. The plan is derived by decomposing the registration of the goal object into a series of object registration subtasks using the anatomy knowledge and the modality-specific image properties. Preliminary experiments to recognize the aorta in human abdominal CT images have demonstrated the potential of our method.