Registration of 3-D CT and 2-D flat images of mouse via affine transformation.

It is difficult to directly coregister the 3-D fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) image of a small tumor in a mouse whose maximal diameter is only a few millimeters with a larger CT image of the entire animal that spans about 10 cm. This paper proposes a new method to register 2-D flat and 3-D CT image first to facilitate the registration between small 3-D FMT images and large 3-D CT images. A novel algorithm combining differential evolution and improved simplex method for the registration between the 2-D flat and 3-D CT images is introduced and validated with simulated images and real images of mice. The visualization of the alignment of the 3-D FMT and CT image through 2-D registration shows promising results.