Optimization strategies for ultrasound volume registration

This paper considers registration of 3D ultrasound volumes acquired in multiple views for display in a single image volume. One way to acquire 3D data is to use a mechanically swept 3D probe. However, the usefulness of these probes is restricted by their limited field of view. This problem can be overcome by attaching a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) position sensor to the probe, and displaying the information from multiple sweeps in their proper positions. However, an external six-DOF position sensor can be an inconvenience in a clinical setting. The objective of this paper is to propose a hybrid strategy that replaces the sensor with a combination of three-DOF image registration and an unobtrusive inertial sensor for measuring orientation. We examine a range of optimization algorithms and similarity measures for registration and compare them in in vitro and in vivo experiments. We register based on multiple reslice images rather than a whole voxel array. In this paper, we use a large number of reslices for improved reliability at the expense of computational speed. We have found that the Levenberg–Marquardt method is very fast but is not guaranteed to give the correct solution all the time. We conclude that normalized mutual information used in the Nelder–Mead simplex algorithm is potentially suitable for the registration task with an average execution time of around 5 min, in the majority of cases, with two restarts in a C++ implementation on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU machine