Image registration

In order to demonstrate the growth of the medical image registration field over the past decades, this paper presents the number of journal publications on this topic since 1988 until 2002. In a similar manner, trends in topics within the field of medical image registration are detected. Publications on computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are rather constant through the years. Positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), on the other hand, seem to loose ground to newly emerging functional imaging techniques, such as functional MRI (fMRI) whereas an increase in interest in registration of ultrasound (US) images was observed. Two topics in image registration that are currently considered hot are intraoperative and elastic registration. Although the interest in intraoperative registration strongly increased in the late 1990s, there seems to be a slight relative decrease in recent years. On the other hand, elastic registration has become a popular topic, reaching the highest numbers so far in 2002.