[Comparison of the accuracy of 3-dimensional fusion algorithms]

Recently many algorithms for matching three-dimensional medical data have been developed. Inter- and intramodal fusion of data adds valuable information for planning, controlling and evaluating therapies. This work presents a procedure to evaluate the accuracy of fusion algorithms by numerical means. In contrast to the usual way of visual inspection the developed software tools allow automatic numerical--and thus objective--evaluation of different algorithms using simulated realistic volume data. It is therefore possible to conduct reproducible comparisons of different matching methods. These tools also proved to be very valuable during the development and optimisation of an algorithm employing normalised mutual information.