Multimodal Medical Image Registration Based on Feature Spheres in Geometric Algebra

Multi-modal image registration in medical image analysis is very challenging as the appearance of body structures in images from different imaging devices can be very different. In this paper, we propose a new method [GA-speeded up robust features (SURF)], which incorporates the geometric algebra (GA) into SURF framework, to detect features from images. We model the volumetric data and register the multimodal medical images using feature spheres formulated in conformal geometric algebra (CGA). Specifically, we first extract features from medical images using GA-SURF. Second, we construct the feature spheres using the feature points and find the correspondence of feature spheres in the two images using CGA. With that, we can register the images based on the correspondence of the feature spheres. The experimental results evaluated by RIRE have shown that our method can register the multi-modal images with high accuracy. The maximum registration error is less than 4mm.