APPLICATION OF IMAGE REGISTRATION TECHNIQUES IN DYNAMIC MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING OF BREAST
Karol Kuczyński, Maciej Siczek, Rafał Stęgierski · 2011
Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a relatively new, promising technique for breast cancer diagnostics. A few series of imag es of the same body region are rapidly acquired bef ore, during and after injection of paramagnetic contrast agent. Pro pagation of the contrast agent causes modification of MR signal over time. Its analysis provides information on tissue p roperties, including tumour status, that is not ava ilable with the regular MRI. Unintentional patient’s movements during the examination result with incorrect alignment of the consecutive image series. Their analysis is then di fficult, inaccurate or even impossible. The purpose of this work is to design a registration scheme that could be applied to solve the problem in a routine manner, in standa rd hospital conditions. The proposed registration framework, co mposed of B-spline transformation, mean squares metric and LBFGSB optimizer, is able to produce satisfactory r esults within reasonable time.