Medical Image Registration Technique Based on Partial Differential Equation

The radiological examination of congenital clubfoot is used not only in primary differential diagnostics and documentation, but frequently in follow-up as well. To eliminate the radiation risk, ultrasound is a relatively simple, and it is easily available, also, an inexpensive procedure for objective documentation of clubfoot correction. Image registration has a vast range of applications, and it is essential in order to study the evolution of pathology of a patient or to take full advantage of the complementary information coming from multimodal imagery. The purpose of the registration is to determine a transformation source image I-s onto target image I-t. Ideally, one wants to determine a displacement field to improve the evaluation of the anatomy and the mobility of talus and calcaneus in clubfeet. The deformable registration calculates the displacement field, by minimizing energy functional, consisting of a regularization term and sum of square residuals of corresponding two sets of N points, between the two images. The proposed method is successfully applied to estimate displacement vector fields to improve the evaluation of the anatomy and the mobility of talus and calcaneus in clubfeet using a registration multimodal medical method based on Partial Differential Equation (PDE).