Evaluation of 3D ultrasound image registration

Image registration plays a crucial role for the accurate reconstruction of an organ from partial ultrasound volumes and the subsequent accurate resection of a lesion/tumor with an optimally minimal damage of the healthy tissue. With the help of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), various state-of-the-art voxel-based 3D image registration algorithms were inves-tigated, implemented and evaluated, allowing for the assessment of an accurate ultrasound image registration scheme. The investigation of the 3D space was based on an investigation of the 2D space, where the image registration compo-nents showing low performance were sorted out. The performance was assessed by calculating the standard deviation (SD) of the resulting difference images. Overall the mutual information and joint histogram based metrics showed low performance (2D - SD up to 25,9), whereas the Powell direction set algorithm in combination with the mean squares metric showed a better performance (3D - SD: 22,4).