A New Method for the Registration of Cardiac PET and MR Images Using Deformable Model Based Segmentation of the Main Thorax Structures

Integration of magnetic resonance (MR) and positron emission tomography (PET) images of the heart has proved its usefulness for the estimation of the myocardial viability. In this paper, a method for the rigid registration of cardiac MR and PET images is presented. It is based on the matching of the surfaces of thorax structures extracted by a deformable model from PET transmission and MR transaxial images. MR short axis registration with PET emission image is easily derived and allows the study viability in the proper anatomic conditions. The method has been evaluated on ten patients suffering from three vessel coronary artery disease. Qualitative results were good with 9 over the 10 available cases. A quantitative estimation of the registration quality confirmed the nice abilities of this approach.