A stationary wavelet transform based approach to registration of planning CT and setup cone beam-CT images in radiotherapy.

Image registration between planning CT images and cone beam-CT (CBCT) images is one of the key technologies of image guided radiotherapy (IGRT). Current image registration methods fall roughly into two categories: geometric features-based and image grayscale-based. Mutual information (MI) based registration, which belongs to the latter category, has been widely applied to multi-modal and mono-modal image registration. However, the standard mutual information method only focuses on the image intensity information and overlooks spatial information, leading to the instability of intensity interpolation. Due to its use of positional information, wavelet transform has been applied to image registration recently. In this study, we proposed an approach to setup CT and cone beam-CT (CBCT) image registration in radiotherapy based on the combination of mutual information (MI) and stationary wavelet transform (SWT). Firstly, SWT was applied to generate gradient images and low frequency components produced in various levels of image decomposition were eliminated. Then inverse SWT was performed on the remaining frequency components. Lastly, the rigid registration of gradient images and original images was implemented using a weighting function with the normalized mutual information (NMI) being the similarity measure, which compensates for the lack of spatial information in mutual information based image registration. Our experiment results showed that the proposed method was highly accurate and robust, and indicated a significant clinical potential in improving the accuracy of target localization in image guided radiotherapy (IGRT).