Abstract: This paper describes a method which uses the skull as a landmark for automatic registration of computer tomography to magnetic resonance (MR) images. First, the skull is extracted from both images using a new creaseness operator. Then, the resulting creaseness images are used to build a hierarchic structure which permits a robust and fast search. We have justified experimentally the performance of several choices of our algorithm, and we have thoroughly tested its accuracy and robustness against the well-known mutual information method for five different pairs of images. We have found both comparable, and for certain MR images the proposed method achieves better performance.

Abstract: Creases are a type of ridge/valley structures that can be characterized by local conditions. Therefore, creaseness refers to local ridgeness and valleyness. The curvature K of the level curves and the mean curvature kM of the level surfaces are good measures of creaseness for 2-d and 3-d images, respectively. However, the way they are computed gives rise to discontinuities, reducing their usefulness in many applications. We propose a new creaseness measure, based on these curvatures, that avoids the discontinuities. We demonstrate its usefulness in the registration of CT and MR brain volumes, from the same patient, by searching the maximum in the correlation of their creaseness responses (ridgeness from the CT and valleyness from the MR). Due to the high dimensionality of the space of transforms, the search is performed by a hierarchical approach combined with an optimization method at each level of the hierarchy