Combination of automatic non-rigid and landmark based registration: the best of both worlds

Automatic, parameter-free, and non-rigid registration schemes are known to be valuable tools in various (medical) image processing applications. Typically, these approaches aim to match intensity patterns in each scan by minimizing an appropriate distance measure. The outcome of an automatic registration procedure in general matches the target image quite good on the average. However, it may be inaccurate for specific, important locations as for example anatomical landmarks. On the other hand, landmark based registration techniques are designed to accurately match user specified landmarks. A drawback of landmark based registration is that the intensities of the images are completely neglected. Consequently, the registration result away from the landmarks may be very poor. Here we propose a framework for novel registration techniques which are capable to combine automatic and landmark driven approaches in order to benefit from the advantages of both strategies. We also propose a general, mathematical treatment of this framework and a particular implementation. The procedure computes a displacement field which is guaranteed to produce a one-to-one match between given landmarks and at the smae time minimizes an intensity based measure for the remaining parts of the images. The properties of the new scheme are demonstrated for a variety of numerical example. It is worthwhile noticing, that we not only present a new approach. Instead, we propose a general framework for a variety of different approaches. The choice of the main building blocks, the distance measure and the smoothness constraint, is essentially free.