Matching 3-D Prone and Supine CT Colonography Scans Using Graphs

In this paper, we propose a new registration method for prone and supine computed tomographic colonography scans using graph matching. We formulate 3-D colon registration as a graph matching problem and propose a new graph matching algorithm based on mean field theory. In the proposed algorithm, we solve the matching problem in an iterative way. In each step, we use mean field theory to find the matched pair of nodes with highest probability. During iterative optimization, one-to-one matching constraints are added to the system in a step-by-step approach. Prominent matching pairs found in previous iterations are used to guide subsequent mean field calculations. The proposed method was found to have the best performance with smallest standard deviation compared with two other baseline algorithms called the normalized distance along the colon centerline (NDACC) ( p = 0.17) with manual colon centerline correction and spectral matching ( p < 1e−5). A major advantage of the proposed method is that it is fully automatic and does not require defining a colon centerline for registration. For the latter NDACC method, user interaction is almost always needed for identifying the colon centerlines.