Publications by Daniel Forsberg

Image registration is a well-known concept within the medical image domain and has been shown to be useful in a number of dierent tasks. However, due to sometimes long processing times, image registration is not fully utilized in clinical workows, where time is an important factor. During the last couple of years, a number of signicant projects have been introduced to make the computational power of GPUs available to a wider audience, where the most well known is CUDA. In this paper we present, with the aid of CUDA, a speedup in the range of 38-44x (from 29 minutes to 40 seconds) when implementing a phasebased non-rigid image registration algorithm, known as the Morphon, on a single GPU. The achieved speedup is in the same magnitude as the speedups reported from other non-rigid registration algorithms fully ported to the GPU. Given the impressive speedups, both reported in this paper and other papers, we therefore consider that it is now feasible to eectively integrate image registration into various clinical workows, where time is a critical factor.

The visualization of images with a large dynamic range is a difficult task and this is especially the case for gray-level images. In radiology departments, this will force radiologists to review medical images several times, since the images need to be visualized with several different contrast windows (transfer functions) in order for the full information content of each image to be seen. Previously suggested methods for handling this situation include various approaches using histogram equalization and other methods for processing the image data. However, none of these utilize the underlying human anatomy in the images to control the visualization and the fact that different transfer functions are often only relevant for disjoint anatomical regions. In this paper, we propose a method for using model-based local transfer functions. It allows the reviewing radiologist to apply multiple transfer functions simultaneously to a medical image volume. This provides the radiologist with a tool for making the review process more efficient, by allowing him/her to review more of the information in a medical image volume with a single visualization. The transfer functions are automatically assigned to different anatomically relevant regions, based upon a model registered to the volume to be visualized. The transfer functions can be either pre-defined or interactively changed by the radiologist during the review process. All of this is achieved without adding any unfamiliar aspects to the radiologist’s normal work-flow, when reviewing medical image volumes.

The need of image registration is increasing, especially in the medical image domain. The simplest kind of image registration is to match two images that have similar intensity. More advanced cases include the problem of registering images of different intensity, for which phase based algorithms have proven to be superior. In some cases the phase based registration will fail as well, for instance when the images to be registered do not only differ in intensity but also in local phase. This is the case if a dark circle in the reference image is a bright circle in the source image. While rigid registration algorithms can use other parts of the image to calculate the global transformation, this problem is harder to solve for non-rigid registration. The solution that we propose in this work is to use the local phase of the magnitude of the local structure tensor, instead of the local phase of the image intensity. By doing this, we achieve invariance both to the image intensity and to the local phase and thereby only use the structural information, i.e. the shapes of the objects, for registration.

This paper presents an overview of the project “Classification of multivariate medical datasets using deformable models” and the current work within the project. The project is a joint venture between the Department of Biomedical Engineering (Linköping University), the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (Linköping University) and Sectra Imtec AB (Linköping) and focuses on extending a deformable model approach, named the Morphon, to 3D and to utilize multi-variate data with multiple priors. Recent work in the project includes evaluating different methods for estimating the displacement field and automatic scale control.