Registration of the vertebrae

The vertebrae registration is very important to treat the vertebrae diseases. As the vertebrae has rigid bones and soft tissue, the traditional nonrigid registration can’t work well on that. In this paper, a novel multi-stage nonrigid registration with rigid constraint to the vertebrae is presented. Firstly, A new rigid transform constraint is introduced, which penalizes nonrigid deformations at locations where it is required. The nonrigid registration method based on B-Spline is extended to allow the incorporation of the rigid transformation. Secondly, the vertebrae registration using the vertebrae property and the nonrigid registration with rigid constraint is introduced. Thirdly the registration experiments are performed on 2D synthetic data and the vertebrae slices. Experiments show that the proposed registration with rigid constraint is successful to improve the vertebrae registration quality.