Multi-modal medical volumes fusion by surface matching

Presents a fast, six degrees of freedom, registration technique to accurately locate the position and orientation of medical volumes (e.g. CT, MRI) with respect to each other for the same patient. The technique uses surface registration and maximization of mutual information. We have developed a novel technique for surface registration which produces highly accurate results when registering two different volumes of the same individual generated from the same modality, such as preoperative MR and intraoperative MR volumes. In case surface registration is not able to accurately register the different volumes, the result is enhanced by multi-modal volume registration. The gain of this combination is to have an accurate alignment and to reduce time needed for registration. For the multi-modal volume registration, the maximization of mutual information (MI) as a matching criterion is used based on genetic algorithms (GA) as a search engine. Our results demonstrate that our registration technique allows for fast, accurate, robust and completely automatic registration of multimodality medical volumes