3D Multimodal Image Registration: Application to equine PET and CT images
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Abstract
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is being widely used in veterinary
medicine in recent years. Although it was limited to small animals because of its
classical design and the large amount of radionuclide doses required, PET imaging in
horses became possible with the introduction of a portable PET scanner developed
by Brain Biosciences Inc. It was observed that this new modality could capture
abnormalities like lesions that Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) and other modalities could not. Since 2016, PET imaging in horses
is being studied and analysed.
While PET provides functional information characterizing the activity of lesions,
it is useful to combine information from other modalities like CT and match
the structural information to develop an accurate spatial representation of the data.
Since biochemical changes occur much earlier than structural changes, this helps
detect lesions and tumours during the early stages. Multimodal image registration
is used to achieve this goal. A series of steps are proposed to automate the process
of registration of equine PET and CT images. Multimodal image registration using landmark-based and intensity-based techniques are studied. It is observed
that a few tissues are not imaged in the PET, which makes image segmentation,
an important preprocessing step in the registration process. A study of the segmentation
algorithms relevant to the field of medical imaging is presented. The
performance of segmentation algorithms improved with the extent of manual interaction
and intensity-based registration gave the smallest time complexity with
reasonable accuracy.