Impact of Enhancement Featureson Image Registration for Liver Cancer Interventions Using CT Images

In minimally invasive interventions for liver cancer treatment, image registration is a powerful technique to align diagnostic information, such as tumors and vessels, to the interventional images. In this paper, we investigate how the contrast-enhanced features in computed tomography (CT) images i.e. the tumors and the vessels, help the registration. For this, we de-enhance the contrast-enhanced CT image (iDECT) of the liver acquired during the intervention; and then we compare the accuracy of the registration between the diagnostic contrast-enhance CT image (dCECT) and the original interventional contrast-enhanced image (iCECT) versus the dCECT image and the de-enhanced image (iDECT). In addition, we use a rigidity term to improve the registration using the de-enhanced image. The method is evaluated on 11 clinical datasets.