Integrated registration and visualization of MR and PET brain images

Different imaging modalities give insight to vascular, anatomical and functional information that assists diagnosis and treatment planning in medicine. Depending on the clinical requirement, it is often not sufficient to consider anatomical and functional information separately but to superimpose images of different modalities. However it would often provide unreliable results since functional modalities have low sampling resolution. In this paper, we present a novel technique of improving an image fusion quality and speed by integrating voxel-based registration and consecutive visualization. In the first part, we discuss a voxel-based registration using mutual information including gradient measure to consider spatial information in the images and thereby provide a much more general and reliable measure. In the second part, we propose a volume rendering technique for generating high-quality images rapidly without specialized hardware. Fusion of MR and PET brain images are presented for visual validation for the proposed methods. Our method offers a robust technique to fuse anatomical and functional modalities which allow direct functional to structural correlation analysis.