Application of the optical correlator in the medical image registration

Medical image registration, which is the precondition of medical image fusion, is a highlight of present medical image processing, and has important values in clinical diagnosis and treatment. To match the medical images with low SNR, the joint transform correlator is used to measure the image motion between the serial images. The principle of this method is described, then the experiment is done by using some medical images. The results showed that, the joint transform correlator can measure the sub-pixel image shifts entirely even for the images with SNR=1, and mean square deviation of the measurement error no more than 0.2 pixels.