基于肺部组织特征的图像弹性配准研究

图像配准是一种建立两幅图像空间对应关系的过程,它被广泛应用于计算机视觉、遥感数据分析及图像处理中,特别是在影像引导放射治疗领域,图像配准发挥着巨大作用。但由于受呼吸运动的影响,精确的肺部影像配准依然是一个充满挑战的难题。目前,尺度不变特征变换(Scale-Invariant Feature Transform,SIFT)已被用于医学图像配准中,并且取得了较理想的结果。然而,SIFT检测到的仅是图像的块特征,不能有效的反映肺部的运动。文章提出了一种基于Harris和SIFT算子的杂交型特征检测方法,这种方法能有效检测肺部的组织特征,如血管分叉点和肺部边界等。除此之外,为了有效去除特征匹配过程中产生的错配点,还提出了一种基于互相关和组织结构不变性的滤除错配点方法。文章最后采用一系列不同呼吸周期的肺部CT影像来对所提出的算法进行验证。定性和定量的结果表明,该算法较传统的SIFT算法更具优越性。

A Study on the Deformable Image Registration Based on the Tissue Features of Lungs

The image registration is a process of establishing spatial correspondences between two images. It is widely used in the computer vision, the remote sensing data analysis and the image processing. Especially in the image-guided radiation therapy, the image registration plays an important role. Recently, the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) has been used in the medical image registration, and obtained promising results. However, SIFT is apt to detect blob features which cannot reflect properly motions of lungs. In this paper, a hybrid feature detection method, which can detect lung tissue features effectively based on Harris and SIFT algorithms, was proposed. In addition, a novel method which can remove mismatched landmarks was also proposed. A series of thoracic CT images were tested by using the proposed algorithm. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method is much better than the conventional SIFT method especially in the case of large deformations of lungs during the respiration.