Medical Image Registration and Fusion with 3D CT and MR Data of Head

The purpose of this study is to register the 3D image from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) and therefore to integrate the information of hard and soft tissue. The slices with maximum areas detected from both 3D data sets were used as the corresponding slices to calculate the parameters of scale, rotation and translation for 3D data registration and fusion. The registered volume data were then visualized by the shell rendering method and the target contours, including the face and brain, were reconstructed by the surface rendering. The result of shell rendering can not only provide complete and integrated information of the combined image data in terms of 3D visualization but also reveal the 2D plane in any orientation. The 3D contours obtained by surface rendering can transformed into VRML format for any virtual reality applications