Numerical recipes in FORTRAN (2nd ed.): the art of scientific computing
Numerical recipes in FORTRAN (2nd ed.): the art of scientific computing
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A novel image registration method is presented for multimodality, gated cardiac imaging. The motion of the myocardium is registered instead of attributes obtained from image intensities, which may be drastically different. Optical flow methods are used to estimate a set of 3D vector fields for both modalities. The 3D vector fields are assumed to be similar and are rigidly aligned by minimizing a sum-of-squares error objective function. Evaluation of the motion-based (MB) method was performed using simulated cardiac SPECT and CT images of a 4D thorax phantom for registration errors of 1 to 3 cm translation, with and without rotation. The MB method was compared to a mutual information (MI) based method. The MB method was able to register the images with an accuracy of 1-5 mm for an anatomical point in the left ventricle. The MI method required a common background distribution within the two modalities for accurate registration.