Digital Image Processing Lab

Department of Radiology, University of Michigan

An Application of MI-based Automated Registration:
Fusion of Thoracic Datasets

The 18-FDG PET and CT data sets shown in this study were acquired from a patient with lung cancer. For the CT exam the patient used shallow, free respiration with arms placed at the sides to mimic PET data acquisition conditions. Note the resulting accurate delineation of the cardiac and vascular structures, as well as that of the lesion. One pair of well-registered, prospectively placed, external sternal surface markers can also be seen, even though the marker played little to no role in the registration. The apparent registration accuracy using the full affine geometric model is a tribute to positioning the patient in a consistent scanning geometry for both modalities, i.e. arms down in both scanners, as well as the use of an accurate registration algorithm. Generally in cases where the geometry is less consistent, geometric warping is required to obtain accurate registrations.

The registrations were performed using our "MIAMI Fuse" (Mutual Information for Automatic Multimodality Image Fusion) software as described fully in Meyer, et al.

Rendering of fused thoracic datasets (114K color, 852x416 gif)