Fast tensor image morphing for elastic registration.

We propose a novel algorithm, called Fast Tensor Image Morphing for Elastic Registration or F-TIMER. F-TIMER leverages multiscale tensor regional distributions and local boundaries for hierarchically driving deformable matching of tensor image volumes. Registration is achieved by aligning a set of automatically determined structural landmarks, via solving a soft correspondence problem. Based on the estimated correspondences, thin-plate splines are employed to generate a smooth, topology preserving, and dense transformation, and to avoid arbitrary mapping of non-landmark voxels. To mitigate the problem of local minima, which is common in the estimation of high dimensional transformations, we employ a hierarchical strategy where a small subset of voxels with more distinctive attribute vectors are first deployed as landmarks to estimate a relatively robust low-degrees-of-freedom transformation. As the registration progresses, an increasing number of voxels are permitted to participate in refining the correspondence matching. A scheme as such allows less conservative progression of the correspondence matching towards the optimal solution, and hence results in a faster matching speed. Results indicate that better accuracy can be achieved by F-TIMER, compared with other deformable registration algorithms, with significantly reduced computation time cost of 4-14 folds.