A Strategy to Quantitatively Evaluate MRI/PET Cardiac Rigid Registration Methods Using a Monte Carlo Simulator

The goal of this work is to present a strategy to validate cardiac MRI/PET registration methods. The strategy relies on a MRI/PET image reference data set including a computer generated PET data set of the thorax and its structures. This data set was produced using a Monte Carlo simulator from segmented T1-weighted MRI thorax data. From the reference data set as a gold standard, test transformations are randomly generated and used to quantify registration accuracy. The validation approach has been applied to our own rigid registration method with three different similarity measures: Correlation Ratio, Correlation Coefficient and Mutual Information. In this study, we observed that the Correlation Ratio gave better results both for thorax and heart image registration.

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