A Systematic Review on Image Registration in Interventionist Procedures: Ultrasound and Magnetic Resonance

Medical images are a powerful tool to help the physicians in diagnosis and planning a surgery. Ultrasound (US) and Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) are the most used techniques in the literature with this purpose. Both have their positive points and negative points related to the quality of the image acquisition, some parameters which are looked for are if the same technique, or combination, can give a high-quality definition of the position and fast acquisition of the image. With this worry in mind, this work has the aim to answer a specific question: “Which are the characteristics of ultrasound and magnetic resonance image registration methods for interventional procedures?”. We used the PICOS (Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, Study) tool to define the search. As the inclusion and exclusion criteria were the year range (from 2013 to 2019) and if the study applied both US and MRI for image registration. As a result, 22 out of 96 articles matched the criteria. It was observed that Urology, Neurology, Hepatology, Cardiology and Gynecology are the medical fields in which the US and MRI combination are most used. There was a preference by the authors for the use of non-rigid transformations for recording US and MRI images. This fact can be justified by the need to consider the difference in the shape of structures in the US and MRI images for registration. The accuracy was the most used metric in the evaluation of image recording methods. The metrics used to assess accuracy varied according to the study field.