The adaptive FEM elastic model for medical image registration

This paper proposes an adaptive mesh refinement strategy for the finite element method (FEM) based elastic registration model. The signature matrix for mesh refinement takes into account the regional intensity variance and the local deformation displacement. The regional intensity variance reflects detailed information for improving registration accuracy and the deformation displacement fine-tunes the mesh refinement for a more efficient algorithm. The gradient flows of two different similarity metrics, the sum of the squared difference and the spatially encoded mutual information for the mono-modal and multi-modal registrations, are used to derive external forces to drive the model to the equilibrium state. We compared our approach to three other models: (1) the conventional multi-resolution FEM registration algorithm; (2) the FEM elastic method that uses variation information for mesh refinement; and (3) the robust block matching based registration. Comparisons among different methods in a dataset with 20 CT image pairs upon artificial deformation demonstrate that our registration method achieved significant improvement in accuracies. Experimental results in another dataset of 40 real medical image pairs for both mono-modal and multi-modal registrations also show that our model outperforms the other three models in its accuracy.