A comparison of thin-plate splines with automatic correspondences and B-splines with uniform grids for multimodal prostate registration

This paper provides a comparison of spline-based registration methods applied to register interventional Trans Rectal Ultrasound (TRUS) and pre-acquired Magnetic Resonance (MR) prostate images for needle guided prostate biopsy. B-splines and Thin-plate Splines (TPS) are the most prevalent spline-based approaches to achieve deformable registration. Pertaining to the strategic selection of correspondences for the TPS registration, we use an automatic method already proposed in our previous work to generate correspondences in the MR and US prostate images. The method exploits the prostate geometry with the principal components of the segmented prostate as the underlying framework and involves a triangulation approach. The correspondences are generated with successive refinements and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) is employed to determine the optimal number of correspondences required to achieve TPS registration. B-spline registration with successive grid refinements are consecutively applied for a significant comparison of the impact of the strategically chosen correspondences on the TPS registration against the uniform B-spline control grids. The experimental results are validated on 4 patient datasets. Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) is used as a measure of the registration accuracy. Average DSC values of 0.97±0.01 and 0.95±0.03 are achieved for the TPS and B-spline registrations respectively. B-spline registration is observed to be more computationally expensive than the TPS registration with average execution times of 128.09 ± 21.7 seconds and 62.83 ± 32.77 seconds respectively for images with maximum width of 264 pixels and a maximum height of 211 pixels.