A primal-dual approach for discontinuity preserving registration

Image registration is a powerful tool in medical image analysis and facilitates the clinical routine in several aspects. There are many well established non-rigid registration methods, but those which are able to preserve discontinuities in the displacement field are rather rare. This paper deals with a nonrigid registration method, that can handle discontinuities in the motion field that appear in particular at organ boundaries during the breathing induced organ motion. Due to the fact that motion segmentation could play a guiding role during discontinuity preserving registration, we therefore embed the registration method in a segmentation framework. Furthermore, we are able to use a primal-dual method to estimate a solution to this complex variational problem. Experimental results are presented for MR Images with apparent breathing induced sliding motion of the liver along the abdominal wall.