Automatic registration and fusion of ultrasound with CT for radiotherapy

We present a framework for rigid registration of a set of B-mode ultrasound images to a CT scan in the context of Radiotherapy planning. Our main focus is on deriving an appropriate similarity measure based on the physical properties and artifacts of ultrasound. A combination of a weighted Mutual Information term, edge correlation, clamping to the skin surface and occlusion detection is able to assess the alignment of structures in ultrasound images and simulated slices generated from the CT data. Hence a set of ultrasound images, whose relative transformations are given by a magnetic tracking device, can be registered automatically to the CT scan. We validated our methods on neck data of patients with head and neck tumors and cervical lymph node metastases.