Deformable registration of MR images using a hierarchical patch based approach with a normalized metric quality measure

Magnitude Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DW-MRI) is used to detect lesions in abdominal organs such as the liver. For diagnosis and interventional planning, DW-MRI needs to be registered with Magnetic Resonance (MRI) images in order to provide an anatomical context. DW-MRI usually generates images that contain large regions with only little image information. This makes it difficult to elastically register those images to images from other imaging modalities. In this work, we apply a deformable registration approach in order to register magnitude DW-MRI data with MRI images. A normalized quality measure is used to sort out local deformations in low image signal areas that cause non-plausible local deformations. An evaluation on 5 patients shows promising results.