Non-rigid Registration of Vessel Structures in IVUS Images

We present a registration and retrieval algorithm of medical images. Our algorithm is oriented in a general fashion towards gray level medical images of non-rigid bodies such as coronary vessels, where object shape information provide poor information. We use rich descriptors based on both local and global (contextual) information, and at the same time we use a cooperative-iterative strategy in order to get a good set of correspondences as well as a good final transformation. We focus on a novel application of registration of medical images: registration of IVUS, a promising technique of analyzing the coronary vessels.