RegistrationShop: An Interactive 3D Medical Volume Registration System

Abstract

In medical imaging, registration is used to combine images containing information from different modalities or to track treatment effects over time in individual patients. Most registration software packages do not provide an easy-to-use interface that facilitates the use of registration. 2D visualization techniques are often used for visualizing 3D datasets. RegistrationShop was developed to improve and ease the process of volume registration using 3D visualizations and intuitive interactive tools. It supports several basic visualizations of 3D volumetric data. Interactive rigid and non-rigid transformation tools can be used to manipulate the volumes and immediate visual feedback for all rigid transformation tools allows the user to examine the current result in real-time. In this context, we introduce 3D comparative visualization techniques, as well as a way of placing landmarks in 3D volumes. Finally, we evaluated our approach with domain experts, who underlined the potential and usefulness of RegistrationShop.