A Medical Image Registration Method Based on Progressive Images

Background. Medical image registration is an essential task for medical image analysis in various applications. In this work, we develop a coarse-to-fine medical image registration method based on progressive images and SURF algorithm (PI-SURF) for higher registration accuracy. Methods. As a first step, the reference image and the floating image are fused to generate multiple progressive images. Thereafter, the floating image and progressive image are registered to get the coarse registration result based on the SURF algorithm. For further improvement, the coarse registration result and the reference image are registered to perform fine image registration. The appropriate progressive image has been investigated by experiments. The mutual information (MI), normal mutual information (NMI), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC), and mean square difference (MSD) similarity metrics are used to demonstrate the potential of the PI-SURF method. Results. For the unimodal and multimodal registration, the PI-SURF method achieves the best results compared with the mutual information method, Demons method, Demons+B-spline method, and SURF method. The MI, NMI, and NCC of PI-SURF are improved by 15.5%, 1.31%, and 7.3%, respectively, while MSD decreased by 13.2% for the multimodal registration compared with the optimal result of the state-of-the-art methods. Conclusions. The extensive experiments show that the proposed PI-SURF method achieves higher quality of registration.