Registration of sliding objects using direction dependent B-splines decomposition

Sliding motion is a challenge for deformable image registration because it leads to discontinuities in the sought deformation. In this paper, we present a method to handle sliding motion using multiple B-spline transforms. The proposed method decomposes the sought deformation into sliding regions to allow discontinuities at their interfaces, but prevents unrealistic solutions by forcing those interfaces to match. The method was evaluated on 16 lung cancer patients against a single B-spline transform approach and a multi B-spline transforms approach without the sliding constraint at the interface. The target registration error (TRE) was significantly lower with the proposed method (TRE = 1.5 mm) than with the single B-spline approach (TRE = 3.7 mm) and was comparable to the multi B-spline approach without the sliding constraint (TRE = 1.4 mm). The proposed method was also more accurate along region interfaces, with 37% less gaps and overlaps when compared to the multi B-spline transforms without the sliding constraint.