An Effective Non-Rigid Registration Approach for Ultrasound Images Based on the Improved Variational Model of...

Ultrasound images have some limitations, such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), speckle noise, lower dynamic range, blurred boundaries, and shadowing; therefore, ultrasound image registration is an important task for estimating tissue motion and analyzing tissue mechanical properties. In this paper, an effective non-rigid ultrasound image registration method is proposed. By integrating intensity, local phase information, and descriptor matching under a variational framework, we can find and track the non-rigid transformation of each pixel under diffeomorphism between the source and target images based on the warping technique. Experiments using simulation and in vivo ultrasound images of the human carotid artery are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm, which will act as an important supplement to current ultrasound image registration.