Ray-tracing based registration for HRCT images of the lungs

Image registration is a fundamental problem in medical imaging. It is especially challenging in lung images compared, for example, with the brain. The challenges include large anatomical variations of human lung and a lack of fixed landmarks inside the lung. This paper presents a new method for lung HRCT image registration. It employs a landmark-based global transformation and a novel ray-tracing-based lung surface registration. The proposed surface registration method has two desirable properties: 1) it is fully reversible, and 2) it ensures that the registered lung will be inside the target lung. We evaluated the registration performance by applying it to lung regions mapping. Tested on 46 scans, the registered regions were 89% accurate compared with the ground-truth.