A fast and efficient 3D medical image registration method

A fast and efficient 3D medical image registration method based on adjusting divergence and curl of image displacement field is presented. Using the fact that an image registration problem can be formulated as an optimal control problem, corresponding optimization problem is reduced to solving several Poisson equations. These Poisson equations are solved by finite element (FEM) and multigrid methods (MG), separately. Computational examples indicate that both solution approaches produce similarly good registration quality but that the cost associated with the multigrid approach is, on the average, less than that for the FEM.