Role of Liver Registration in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Treatment Planning

This paper describes a new non-rigid approach to register liver images from two different imaging modalities. The deformation is a key challenge in medical image registration. We have proposed a diffeomorphism-based method to tackle this problem using an optimized framework. A non stationary velocity field is used to minimize the effect of forces that are derived from the image gradients. Furthermore, we propose a similarity energy function, based on the gray scale distribution, to limit the fluctuations while approaching the local minima. The proposed method is evaluated on both private and public datasets; the results show that the values of mean square error (MSE), normalized cross-correlation (NCC), structural similarity (SS), mutual information (MI), feature similarity index (FSIM), and mean absolute error (MAE) are 1.3136, 0.9962, 0.9897, 0.883, 0.9922, and 1.52± 2.09, respectively. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluation show promising registration accuracy reflecting the potential of the proposed method.