Intensity-based volumetric registration of contrast-enhanced MR breast images

In this paper, we propose a fast intensity-based registration algorithm for the analysis of contrast-enhanced breast MR images. Motion between pre-contrast and post-contrast images has been modeled by a combination of rigid transformation and free-form deformation. By modeling the conditional probability function to be Gaussian and considering the normalized mutual information (NMI) criterion, we create a pair of auxiliary images to speed up the registration process. The auxiliary images are registered to the actual images by optimizing the simple sum of squared difference (SSD) criterion. The overall registration is achieved by linearly combining the deformation observed in the auxiliary images. One well-known problem of non-rigid registration of contrast enhanced images is the contraction of enhanced lesion volume. We address this problem by rejecting the intensity outliers from registration. Results have shown that our method could achieve accurate registration of the data while successfully prevent the contraction of the contrast enhanced lesion volume.