Deformable ultrasound registration without reconstruction.

Ultrasound (US) imaging is often proposed as an interoperative imaging modality. This use nearly always requires that the collected data be registered to preoperative data of another modality. Existing intensity-based registration approaches all begin by reconstructing a 3D US volume from the collected 2D slices. We propose to directly register the set of 2D slices to the preoperative images. We argue this has a number of advantages, including the omission of the potentially complex reconstruction step, greater adaptability of the similarity measures, and easier parallelization. We describe a system for performing this task and present results on phantom data that show that our slice based method consistently outperforms a reconstruction based method in both speed and accuracy.