Intensity based image registration by minimizing exponential function weighted residual complexity

In this paper, we propose a novel intensity-based similarity measure for medical image registration. Traditional intensity-based methods are sensitive to intensity distortions, contrast agent and noise. Although residual complexity can solve this problem in certain situations, relative modification of the parameter can generate dramatically different results. By introducing a specifically designed exponential weighting function to the residual term in residual complexity, the proposed similarity measure performed well due to automatically weighting the residual image between the reference image and the warped floating image. We utilized local variance of the reference image to model the exponential weighting function. The proposed technique was applied to brain magnetic resonance images, dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance images (DCE-MRI) of breasts and contrast enhanced 3D CT liver images. The experimental results clearly indicated that the proposed approach has achieved more accurate and robust performance than mutual information, residual complexity and Jensen-Tsallis.