Rapid image registration for 3D ultrasound compounding

A Subvolume-based algorithm for Ultrasound REgistration (SURE) has been developed and tested using artificially deformed in vivo ultrasound scans. SURE works in two stages, using MIAMI Fuse software to determine a global, affine registration in the first stage before iteratively dividing the volume into subvolumes and computing local rigid registrations in the second stage. Connectivity of the entire volume is ensured by global interpolation using thin-plate splines (TPSs). To simulate sequential scans, a random nonlinear deformation was applied and both correlated and uncorrelated noise was added to 20 image volumes, each reconstructed from 60 to 120 evenly spaced B-scan slices. Registration using SURE reduced the average displacements of 1.5 and 2.0 mm in the artificially deformed volumes to 0.20 and 0.27 mm, respectively. Registration times were below 5 min on a 500 MHz CPU for an average data set size of 13 MB.