A hybrid framework for registration of carotid ultrasound images combining iconic and geometric features

Stroke is the third major cause of death worldwide behind heart disease and cancer. Carotid atherosclerosis is the most frequent cause of ischemic stroke. Early diagnosis of carotid plaque and serial monitoring of its size with the help of imaging modalities can help to prevent the atherosclerotic complications. The main difficulty is inevitable variability of patient's head positions during image acquisitions. The time series registration of carotid images helps to improve the monitoring, characterization, and quantification of the disease by suppressing the global movements of the patient. In this work, a novel hybrid registration technique has been proposed and evaluated for registration of carotid ultrasound images taken at different times. The proposed hybrid method bridges the gap between the feature-based and intensity-based registration methods. The feature-based iterative closest point algorithm is used to provide a coarse registration which is subsequently refined by the intensity-based algorithm. The proposed framework uses rigid transformation model coupled with mutual information (MI) similarity measure and Powell optimizer. For quantitative evaluation, different registration approaches have been compared using four error metrics: visual information fidelity, structural similarity index, correlation coefficient, and MI. Qualitative evaluation has also been done using the visual examination of the registered image pairs.