Simultaneous pairwise registration for image mosaicing of TEE data

Due to the limited field-of-view of transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) images, mosaicing is required to visualize the entire left atrium in a single image. However, the small overlap between the images and the lack of a single reference image challenges the registration. Our approach is to exploit overlap of an image with multiple other images by simultaneous pairwise registration. Three images were registered to a floating common reference using a rigid transformation. The images iteratively serve as floating reference for the other images. Averaging the resulting transformations for each image will make the simultaneous registration converge to a common reference space. It was shown on randomly transformed MR brain and TEE images that the simultaneous method achieved higher success rates than regular pairwise registration. Initial results on TEE images of the left atrium demonstrated the ability of our method to register the images to a common space.