Intra subject 3D/3D kidney registration using local mutual information maximization.

One of the goal of the Nephron-Sparing Surgery properative planning is to delineate as exactly as possible the renal carcinoma and to specify its relations to the renal arterial, venous and collecting system anatomies. The classical preoperative imaging system is the Spiral CT Urography, which gives sucessive 3D acquisitions of complementary information The integration of this information within the a patient spacific anatomical referential can be achieved by intra-patient registration techniques. A local MI maximization registration method is proposed in this paper. The kidneys are extracted from the abdomen volumes and then the registration between the extracted kidneys is implemented by maximizing the MI between them. The experimental results demonstrates that this method is effective.