Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman1, Jeffery J. Rodriguez1, Christian Graff2, Maria I. Altbach2, Tomislav Dragovich3, Claude B. Sirlin4, Ronald L. Korn5, Natarajan Raghunand2
1Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 2Radiology, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 3Cancer Center, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 4Radiology, The University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; 5Scottsdale Medical Imaging Ltd., Scottsdale, AZ, USA
We introduce a novel technique for registration of DCE-MRI images, the sequential elastic registration (SER) scheme. The performance of SER is compared with two recently published schemes for DCE-MRI registration, progressive principal components registration (PPCR) and pharmacokinetic model-driven registration (PMDR). When tested on a novel DCE-MRI software phantom, all 3 registration schemes were found to be comparably accurate for registering relatively large regions of interest (ROIs) such as muscle, liver, and spleen. However, SER outperformed the other two schemes in registering smaller but significant ROIs such as tumor rim. Quantitative results and performance statistics from clinical DCE-MRI data are presented.