ABSTRACT
The goal of image registration is to find a geometrical transformation that aligns points in one view of an object with corresponding points in another view of an object. In medical applications one of these views will typically be a tomographic image such as CT, MR, SPECT, or PET, but may include x-ray or even video images. The other view may be chosen from one of these
modalities or may be a physical view of the anatomy in space, a view which we treat here as merely another “imaging” modality. An object in medical applications is some portion of anatomy such as the brain, a limb, the chest, the liver, etc. Each view will always include approximately the same anatomical region. Typically the two views will be taken from the same patient, in which case the problem is that of intrapatient registration, but interpatient registration has application as well. Because most research on registration has focused on intrapatient three-dimensional images and rigid-body registration, this chapter likewise concentrates the most attention on this problem.
