Spatio-temporal (2D+T) non-rigid registration of real-time 3D echocardiography and cardiovascular MR image sequences

In this paper we describe a method to non-rigidly co-register a 2D slice sequence from real-time 3D echocardiography with a 2D cardiovascular MR image sequence. This is challenging because the imaging modalities have different spatial and temporal resolution. Non-rigid registration is required for accurate alignment due to imprecision of cardiac gating and natural motion variations between cardiac cycles. In our approach the deformation field between the imaging modalities is decoupled into temporal and spatial components. First, temporal alignment is performed to establish temporal correspondence between a real-time 3D echocardiography frame and a cardiovascular MR frame. Spatial alignment is then performed using an adaptive non-rigid registration algorithm based on local phase mutual information on each temporally aligned image pair. Experiments on seven volunteer datasets are reported. Evaluation of registration errors based on expert-identified landmarks shows that the spatio-temporal registration algorithm gives a mean registration error of 3.56 ± 0.49 and 3.54 ± 0.27 mm for the short and long axis sequences, respectively.