Medical image registration based on watershed transform from greyscale marker and multi-scale parameter search
Guilherme Ruppert, Giovani Chiachia, Felipe P. G. Bergo, Fernanda O. Favretto, Clarissa Lin Yasuda, Anderson De Rezende Rocha, Alexandre X. Falcão · Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering Imaging & Visualization · 2015
We propose an automatic 3D medical image registration method that combines the watershed transform from greyscale marker, to effectively reduce the number of key points needed for registration, with a robust optimisation algorithm, called multi-scale parameter search (MSPS), to quickly estimate the mapping function. We evaluate it for rigid and intra-subject registration of pre- and post-surgery MR-T1 images of the brain. The visual analysis of its effectiveness is facilitated by a colour-coding scheme. Extensive experiments show that our approach is very accurate, robust to noise and provides 3D registration in less than 40 s, with no multi-resolution image schemes needed. We also evaluate MSPS on a testbed of 12 optimisation benchmark problems, in comparison with well-known optimisers, such as particle swarm optimiser, simulated annealing and differential evolution, showing that it can also be explored in other applications.