Sufficient Condition for Local Invertibility of Spatio-Temporal 4D B-Spline Deformations
 
Sufficient Condition for Local Invertibility of Spatio-Temporal 4D B-Spline Deformations 
 
Colas Schretter, Colas Schretter, Se Young Chun, Se Young Chun, Jeff Fessler, Jeff Fessler
 
Abstract 

Recent advances in medical imaging technologies have made 4D image sequences available in clinical routine. As a consequence, image registration techniques are evolving from alignment of pairs of static volumetric images to spatio-temporal registration of dynamic (4D) images. Since the elastic image registration problem is ill-posed, additional prior information or constraints are usually required to regularize the problem. This work proposes to enforce local invertibility (diffeomorphism) of 4D deformations. A novel sufficient condition for local invertibility over continuous space and time is proposed and a practical regularization prior is designed from the theory. The method has been applied to an image registration (motion tracking) of a dynamic 4D CT image sequence. Results show that using proposed regularizer leads to deformations that are more plausible for respiratory motion than the standard approach without additional temporal regularization.