Registration methods for pulmonary image analysis

Various applications in the field of pulmonary image analysis require a registration of CT images of the lung. For example, a registration-based estimation of the breathing motion is employed to increase the accuracy of dose distribution in radiotherapy. Alexander Schmidt-Richberg develops methods to explicitly model morphological and physiological knowledge about respiration in algorithms for the registration of thoracic CT images. Two lung-specific issues are in the focus: on the one hand, the alignment of the interlobular fissures and on the other hand, the estimation of sliding motion at the lung boundaries. It is shown that by explicitly considering these aspects based on a segmentation of the respective structure, registration accuracy can be significantly improved.