A Hybrid Image Registration for Different Phases of Contrast Enhanced Liver CT Data

There are three kinds of blood vessel systems in liver and these different kinds of vessels are typically visible in each phase of contrast enhanced liver CT Data. In order to merge the different information into one image, image registration should be applied. In this paper, a hybrid image registration for different phases of contrast enhanced liver CT data was studied. Firstly, a rigid registration method based on joint histogram was proposed. Then, we propose a nonrigid registration method based on thin-plate splines using a set of corresponding point landmarks. All of landmarks are generated by improved SFIT algorithm automatically. Finally, the post-registration images were fused by a wavelets-based scheme and the different information was merged into a new image.The experiment results demonstrated the effectiveness of the registration scheme.