Affine Medical Image Registration Using the Graphics Processing Unit

Image registration-the task of mapping images into a common coordinate space-is an important investigative tool in science (Maintz and Viergever 1998; Lester and Arridge 1999). In medicine, image registration is necessary when comparing or integrating complementary information from diagnostic scans that were acquired at different times, using different devices, or of different subjects. It is essential in many investigative and diagnostic medical workflows, such as to correct for subject motion between successive scans (Kamitani and Tong 2005), to evaluate longitudinal changes in patients (Morra et al. 2009), and to combine images of multiple individuals to create atlases of normal and abnormal variability of anatomy (Zacharaki et al. 2008), physiology (Tustison et al. 2010), and function (Gholipour et al. 2007). In routine clinical practice, registration is used to improve surgical planning and stereotactic guidance (DiMaio et al. 2006; Archip et al. 2007), electrode localization in the brain (Starreveld 2002), radiotherapy treatment planning (Kessler and Roberson 2006), identification of disease response to therapy (Jongen 2006), and many other medical procedures (Hajnal et al. 2001).