Multi-Part Registration of Regions using the Models derived from the Visible Human Male.

Our research goal is to construct digital anatomy for individual patients. Since the shapes of organs are different patient by patient, registration of organs of different persons is an important research issue. In this paper, we present a new approach to multi-part affine registration which enables to register multiple regions of organs of different persons. We construct a standard anatomy of human heart and lung for the registration. It is derived from the Visible Human Male data set distributed by the United States National Institutes of Health. There are two types of models in the anatomy. They are voxel model and triangular mesh model. To construct the voxel model, we extracted seven regions in the heart, and seven regions in the lung from the Visible Human Male manually. We constructed the triangular mesh model from the voxel model. In the present study, we use the standard anatomy for multi-part affine registration. The registration has two steps. They are registration of each organ, and registration of multiple regions in organs. For example, to register a heart, the heart in the standard anatomy is registered to a threedimensional medical image using an affine registration (i.e. combination of translation, scaling and rotation and scaling registration) algorithm. As a result, the regions of the seven parts in the heart are estimated. Then, the seven parts of the heart in the standard anatomy are registered. The outputs of the registration are positions, rotations, and scales of the regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]