Elastic contour model-based analysis of structural deformations: toward time-sequenced regional lung parenchymal analysis

Time sequenced regional lung parenchymal analysis is dependent upon the successful registration of lung data sets that corrects for local distortions. An elastic model based image registration scheme is proposed and developed in 2D. It models the registration as a deformation process of an elastic material. An example of real lung image registration is given to show the process. The performance of the registration method is assessed by generating a pair of synthetic images with known matching points and comparing the actual matching points with the ones from our method. Three types of geometric transformation are applied to simulate different effects of distortions and the results show good promise to register images with both global and local distortions.