3D registration of medical scanner volumes and tissue section photographs for evaluation of image-guided treatment

We created a method for 3D registration of medical scanner image volumes to gross pathology images. We are applying it to evaluate interventional MRI thermal ablation and in vivo localized drug release from a new device, implanted using CT guidance. The method computes an optimum set of rigid body registration parameters by iterative minimization of the Euclidean distances between automatically generated correspondence points, along manually selected fiducial needle paths, and optional point landmarks. Voxel displacement errors depend only on needle localization error when the angle between needles was at least 15 degrees, and the distance objective function is a useful diagnostic for registration quality.