HAMMER: hierarchical attribute matching mechanism for elastic registration

A new approach is presented for elastic registration of medical images, and is applied to magnetic resonance images of the brain. Experimental results demonstrate remarkably high accuracy in superposition of images from different subjects, thus enabling very precise localization of morphological characteristics in population studies. There are two major novelties in the proposed algorithm. First, it uses an attribute vector, i.e. a set of geometric moment invariants that is defined on each voxel in an image, to reflect the underlying anatomy at different scales. The attribute vector, if rich enough, can distinguish between different parts of an image, which helps establish anatomical correspondences in the deformation procedure. This is a fundamental deviation of our method, referred to as HAMMER, from other volumetric deformation methods, which are typically based on maximizing image similarity. Second, in order to avoid being trapped by local minima, i.e. suboptimal poor matches, HAMMER uses a successive approximation of the energy function being optimized by lower dimensional energy functions, which are constructed to have significantly fewer local minima. This is achieved by hierarchically selecting features that have distinct attribute vectors, thus drastically reducing ambiguity in finding correspondence. A number of experiments in this paper have demonstrated excellent performance.