Dedicated registration for DCE MRI mammography

Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI mammography is currently receiving much interest in clinical research. It bears the potential to discriminate between benign and malignant lesions by analysis of the contrast uptake of the lesion. However, a registration of the individual images of a contrast-uptake series is crucial in order to avoid motion artefacts in the uptake curves, which could affect the diagnosis. It is on the other hand well known from the registration literature that a registration that uses a standard similarity measure (e.g. mean sum of squared differences, cross-correlation) may cause artefacts if contrast agent is taken up between the images to be registered. Thus we propose a registration on the basis of an application-specific similarity measure that explicitly uses features of the contrast uptake. We report initial results using this registration method.