Development of a Multimodal Image Registration and Fusion Technique for Visualising and Monitoring Chronic Skin Wounds

Chronic skin wounds from diabetes, atherosclerosis, and cancer form a large source of morbidity and medical complications. While individual imaging modalities (e.g. visual images, thermograms, ultrasound) can be useful for monitoring the healing process, their use is limited because of the difficulty acquiring and registering multiple images from different modalities. This paper presents a methodology for image registration using an alignment phantom for grayscale images and thermograms. The registration system achieves a Fiducial Registration Error of 0.61 mm and Mutual Information value of 0.774. Future studies will seek to add additional imaging modalities and improve registration for other areas of the body.