Breast Image Registration by Combining Finite Elements and Free-Form Deformations

During breast cancer diagnosis, the breasts undergo large deformations due to gravity or compression loads It is therefore non-trivial to recover the deformation and register medical images of the breast in different orientations (e.g prone versus supine) Free-form deformations and biomechanical finite element models have been used to non-rigidly register breast images from prone to supine, but with limited success In this paper, we demonstrate that the use of a finite element model to predict the deformation of the breast from prone to supine provides a significantly more accurate registration compared to free-form deformation methods We also show that the use of this biomechanical model prediction as a prior to free-form deformation provides a significantly more accurate match than does the use of either method independently.