查看文章

We propose a methodology to register medical images of carotid arteries from tracked freehand sweep B-Mode ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisitions. Successful registration of US and MR images will allow a multimodal analysis of atherosclerotic plaque in the carotid artery. The main challenge is the difference in the positions of the patient’s neck during the examinations. While in MRI the patient’s neck remains in a natural position, in US the neck is slightly bent and rotated. Moreover, the image characteristics of US and MRI around the carotid artery are very different. Our technique uses the estimated centerlines of the common, internal and external carotid arteries in each modality as landmarks for registration. For US, we used an algorithm based on a rough lumen segmentation obtained by robust ellipse fitting to estimate the lumen centerline. In MRI, we extract the …