IMAGE REGISTRATION SYSTEM AND METHOD USING LIKELIHOOD MAXIMIZATION

摘要

An image processing system and method employ a registration processor (130) to calculate a statistical measure of likehood for two volumetric images (110, 112), based on an assumption that the images are probabilitically related. The likelihood is calculated using mutation probabilities (either calculated from prior knowledge of the image relationship or estimated purely from the image data) for some or all voxel pairs in the overlapping volume. The likelihood is calculated for a plurality of transformations in iterative fashion until a transformation that maximizes the likelihood is found. The transformation that maximizes likelihood provides an optimal registration and the parameters for the optimized transform are output to a memory (150) for use by a display system (160) in aligning the images for composite display. The optimized likelihood has a simple and less abstract interpretation adn provides an indication of the quality of the registration.