Registration and analysis of vascular images

We have developed a method for rigidly aligning images of tubes. This paper presents an evaluation of the consistency of that method for three-dimensional images of human vasculature. Vascular images may contain alignment ambiguities, poorly corresponding vascular networks, and non-rigid deformations, yet the Monte Carlo experiments presented in this paper show that our method registers vascular images with sub-voxel consistency in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, we show that the method's insensitivity to non-rigid deformations enables the localization, quantification, and visualization of those deformations. Our method aligns a source image with a target image by registering a model of the tubes in the source image directly with the target image. Time can be spent to extract an accurate model of the tubes in the source image. Multiple target images can then be registered with that model without additional extractions. Our registration method builds upon the principles of our tubular object segmentation work that combines dynamic-scale central ridge traversal with radius estimation. In particular, our registration method's consistency stems from incorporating multi-scale ridge and radius measures into the model-image match metric. Additionally, the method's speed is due in part to the use of coarse-to-fine optimization strategies that are enabled by measures made during model extraction and by the parameters inherent to the model-image match metric.