Medical Image Alignment by Normal Vector Information.

In this paper, a new approach on image registration is presented. We introduce a novel conception- normal vector information (NVI) - to evaluate the similarity between two images. NVI method takes advantage of the relationship between voxels in the image to extract the normal vector (NV) information of each voxel. Firstly, NVI criterion is presented. Then, based on the criterion, we find that NVI related metric has a quite perfect global optimal value on transformation parameter ranges. Finally, registration examples which are based on NVI criterion are provided. The result implies that the feature of smooth value distribution and one global optimal value that NVI metric has makes the optimization procedure much easier to be implemented in image registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]