Creaseness-based computer tomography and magnetic resonance registration: Comparison with the mutual information method

This paper describes a method which uses the skull as a landmark for automatic registration of computer tomography to magnetic resonance (MR) images. First, the skull is extracted from both images using a new creaseness operator. Then, the resulting creaseness images are used to build a hierarchic structure which permits a robust and fast search. We have justified experimentally the performance of several choices of our algorithm, and we have thoroughly tested its accuracy and robustness against the well-known mutual information method for five different pairs of images. We have found both comparable, and for certain MR images the proposed method achieves better performance. © 1999 SPIE and IS&T.