Alignment of 3-D medical data sets based on an efficient optimizer and fast voxel recomputation

An efficient volume registration based on global information content is described. In a nutshell this task represents an optimization problem that is solved with respect to robustness and computational speed especially. Strong attention is paid to the choice of a function that measures the quality of the registration (mutual information) and to the choice of an optimization strategy that searches for a global optimum of the function in a parametric space (adaptive simulated annealing). To speed the registration procedure a multi-resolution strategy and an incremental approach to volume resampling are used.