Application of image registration techniques in breast dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a relatively new, promising technique for breast cancer diagnostics. A few series of images of the same body region are rapidly acquired before, during and after injection of paramagnetic contrast agent. Propagation of the contrast agent causes modification of MR signal over time. Its analysis provides information on tissue properties, including tumour status, that is not available with the regular MRI. If a patient unintentionally changes position during the examination, then the consecutive image series are not properly aligned and their analysis is difficult, inaccurate or even impossible. The purpose of this work is to design a registration scheme that could be applied to solve the problem in a routine manner, in standard hospital conditions. The proposed registration framework, composed of B-spline transformation, mean squares metric and LBFGSB optimizer, is able to produce satisfactory results within reasonable time.