Elastic body splines: a physics based approach to coordinate transformation in medical image matching

In a landmark based medical image matching scheme, a coordinate transformation maps a set of landmark locations in one image onto a corresponding set in a second image. A novel approach to this transformation, the elastic body spline, is introduced. The development of the spline is outlined. An example of using the spline to match 3D magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the breast is described. The elastic body spline is compared to the thin plate spline and, for 3D breast MRIs, is found to have superior performance as assessed by several measures of the similarity of the matched images