Multi-modal 2D-3D Non-rigid Registration

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal non–rigid 2D-3D registration technique. This method allows a non–rigid alignment of a patient pre-operatively computed tomography (CT) to few intra operatively acquired fluoroscopic X-ray images obtained with a C-arm system. This multi-modal approach is especially focused on the 3D alignment of high contrast reconstructed volumes with intra-interventional low contrast X-ray images in order to make use of up–to–date information for surgical guidance and other interventions. The key issue of non-rigid 2D-3D registration is how to define the distance measure between high contrast 3D data and low contrast 2D projections. In this work, we use algebraic reconstruction theory to handle this problem. We modify the Euler–Lagrange equation by introducing a new 3D force. This external force term is computed from the residual of the algebraic reconstruction procedures. In the multi-modal case we replace the residual between the digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRR) and observed X-ray images with a statistical based distance measure. We integrate the algebraic reconstruction technique into a variational registration framework, so that the 3D displacement field is driven to minimize the “reconstruction distance ” between the volumetric data and its 2D projections using mutual information (MI). The benefits of this 2D-3D registration approach are its scalability in the number of used X-ray reference images and the proposed distance that can handle low contrast fluoroscopies as well. Experimental results are presented on both artificial phantom and 3D C-arm CT images