A fast lesion registration to assist coronary heart disease diagnosis in CTA images

This work introduces a 3D+t coronary registration strategy to minimize the navigation among cardiac phases during the process of ischaemic heart disease diagnosis. We propose to register image sub-volumes containing suspected arterial lesions at two cardiac phases, instead of performing a registration of the complete cardiac volume through the whole cardiac cycle. The method first automatically defines the extent of the sub-volumes to be aligned, then the registration is performed in two steps: a coarse rigid alignment and a deformable registration. Our method provides comparable results and is computationally less expensive than previous approaches that make use of larger spatial and temporal information.