Investigation on the use of deformable registrations in lymph node tracking over time

Evolutionary features of lymph nodes such as change in size over time are decisive descriptors to assess disease progression in cancer patient. Other than study at one point in time, it is more useful to derive temporal analysis on structures of interest. The paper presents the use of deformable registration in lymph node tracking, particularly in the context of disease progression. We found that the extent of disease progression plays an important role in determining the performance of deformable registration in aligning up small anatomic structures, such as lymph node. Both Demons and B-spline registrations have their own advantages in different medical context.