Nonrigid registration method for longitudinal chest CT images in COVID-19

To analyze morphological changes in patients with COVID-19-associated pneumonia over time, a nonrigid registration technique is required that reduces differences in respiratory phase and imaging position and does not excessively deform the lesion region. A nonrigid registration method using deep learning was applied for lung field alignment, and its practicality was verified through quantitative evaluation, such as image similarity of whole lung region and image similarity of lesion region, as well as visual evaluation by a physician.

First, the lung field positions and sizes of the first and second CT images were roughly matched using a classical registration method based on iterative calculations as a preprocessing step. Then, voxel-by-voxel transformation was performed using VoxelMorph, a nonrigid deep learning registration method. As an objective evaluation, the similarity of the images was calculated. To evaluate the invariance of image features in the lesion site, primary statistics and 3D shape features were calculated and statistically analyzed. Furthermore, as a subjective evaluation, the similarity of images and whether nonrigid transformation caused unnatural changes in the shape and size of the lesion region were visually evaluated by a pulmonologist.

The proposed method was applied to 509 patient data points with high image similarity. The variances in histogram characteristics before and after image deformation were confirmed. Visual evaluation confirmed the agreement between the shape and internal structure of the lung field and the natural deformation of the lesion region.

The developed nonrigid registration method was shown to be effective for quantitative time series analysis of the lungs.