Knowledge-BasedDeformableMatchingforPathology.PDF

Knowledge-Based Deformable Matching for Pathology Detection Thesis Proposal Mei Chen CMU-RI-TR-97-20 The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 May 1997 c 1997 Carnegie Mellon University This research was partly sponsored by: ASRI-AGH/NIST National Medical Practice Project. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. government. Abstract Image registration is the process of matching corresponding features between images. Medical images present a challenge for registration because the same anatomical features vary considerably in appearance across individuals, and any pathology may aggravate the variation. We propose a registration method that uses knowledge of anatomy to cope with variations in the appearance of corresponding features and to help detect pathologies. The same anatomical fea- ture may have a different density, shape, and size across individuals, but there exists a normal range of variation. Various clinical conditions may affect the gross anatomical morphology, but certain pathologies have characteristic impacts on the anatomy. Traditional registration methods do not seek guidance from this domain knowledge, and they fail to yield accurate registrations because medical images have complicated shapes, non-uniform textures, and ill-defined bound- aries. Our algorithm will attempt to apply domain knowledge in the registration process to cope with the variations in appearance. We are especially interested in the registration of images showin