Multi-modal image registration using structural features

Multi-modal image registration has been a challenging task in medical images because of the complex intensity relationship between images to be aligned. Registration methods often rely on the statistical intensity relationship between the images which suffers from problems such as statistical insufficiency. The proposed registration method works based on extracting structural features by utilizing the complex phase and gradient-based information. By employing structural relationships between different modalities instead of complex similarity measures, the multi-modal registration problem is converted into a mono-modal one. Therefore, conventional mono-modal similarity measures can be utilized to evaluate the registration results. This new registration paradigm has been tested on magnetic resonance (MR) brain images of different modes. The method has been evaluated based on target registration error (TRE) to determine alignment accuracy. Quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of achieving comparable registration accuracy compared to the conventional mutual information.