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CT and PET Image Registration: Application to Thorax Area

Davood Khodadad 1, Alireza Ahmadian 2, Hossein Yousefi Banaem 3, Mohammad Reza Ay 4, and Armaghan Fard-Esfahani 4
1. Experimental Mechanics, Luleå University of Technology SE-971 87, Luleå, Sweden
2. Institute for Advanced Medical Technologies (IAMT), Tehran University of Medical Science, Tehran, Iran
3. Department of Medical Physics and Medical Engineering, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
4. Research Institute for Nuclear Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Science, Tehran, Iran

Abstract—Accurate attenuation correction of emission data is mandatory for quantitative analysis of PET images. One of the main concerns in CT-based attenuation correction (CTAC) of PET data in multimodality PET/CT imaging is misalignment occurred due to respiratory artifact between PET and CT images. In this paper a combined method which is simple and fast is proposed for registration of PET and CT data to correct the effect of this artifact. The algorithm is composed of two step: First step is meant to reduce the noise by applying an adaptive gradient anistropic diffusion filter then using Iterative closest point (ICP) registration method in order to obtain initial estimation to ensure fast and accurate convergence of the algorithm. At the second step, the respiratory related artifact of PET images is greatly reduced by employing Free Form Deformation algorithm based on B-spline which provides more accurate adaptive transformation to align the images
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Index Terms—registration, PET, CT, thorax, FFD, CTAC, gradient anistropic diffusion filter

Cite: Davood Khodadad, Alireza Ahmadian, Hossein Yousefi Banaem, Mohammad Reza Ay, and Armaghan Fard-Esfahani, "CT and PET Image Registration: Application to Thorax Area," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 171-175, December 2013. doi: 10.12720/joig.1.4.171-175