Surface-based automatic coarse registration of head scans

Surface registration is widely used in image-guided neurosurgery to achieve spatial registration between the patient space and the image space. Coarse registration, followed by fine registration, is an important premise to ensure the robustness and efficiency of surface registration. In this paper, a coarse registration algorithm based on the principal axes is proposed to achieve this goal. The extraction of the principal axes relies on the approximated surface with an adaptive Gaussian kernel, the width of which is consistent with neighborhood relation so that it is applicable for various scanning data. Determining the corresponding centers of translation is another problem for aligning different scanning data, which is solved through heuristics. Six pairs of points on two surfaces with the farthest projections on the principal axes were regarded as the candidates of translation centers, and then through tentative alignments of local regions around them, a pair of candidates with the minimum registration error was selected as the optimal translation centers. Automatic registration of two scans of a head phantom is presented in this paper. Experimental results confirmed the robustness of the algorithm and its feasibility in clinical applications.