To Align Multimodal Lumbar Spine Images via Bending Energy Constrained Normalized Mutual Information

Figure 2

The proposed coarse-to-fine framework for aligning CT-MR lumbar spine images. It consists of two stages. The first stage is for global positioning via NMI based rigid registration (highlighted in red), and the second stage is for the local deformation of soft tissues via the bending energy penalized NMI (highlighted in yellow). Both stages utilize the same workflow for iterative optimization.