ISSN 1984-8218

Mutual Information based Medical Image Registration

using Extremal Optimization
Pedro P. Cspedes

Horacio Legal

Christian Schaerer

Universidad Nacional de Asuncin Facultad Politcnica

Laboratorio de Computacin Cientfica y Aplicada
Campus Universitario, San Lorenzo, Paraguay
E-mail: pcespede@pol.una.py, hlegal@pol.una.py, cschaer@pol.una.py

ABSTRACT
Image Registration (IR) is a challenge that arises in many image processing applications
when several images must be aligned. In this work we address the registration of medical
images which can be of different modalities. In this context, one of the most popular approaches
is the Mutual Information based methods [2], [3]. In general, the basic input data for the
registration process are two images: one is referred as the fixed image f (X) and the other as the
moving image m(X), where X represents a position in N-dimensional space. The transform
component T(X) represents the spatial mapping of points from the fixed image space to points
in the moving image space. To determine the quality of the matching process, i.e. how well the
fixed image is matched by the transformed moving image, a metric component S(f,mT) is
usually defined, providing a measure which forms the quantitative criterion to be optimized by
the optimizer over the search space defined by the parameters [4].
As noted in the paragraph above, IR is treated as an optimization problem with the goal of
finding the spatial mapping that will bring the moving image into alignment with the fixed
image [4]. Deterministic optimization algorithms are mostly used to compute the cost function.
They are fast and accurate but in some cases, especially in multimodal IR, these approaches
may stuck in a local optima when the number of transformation parameters increases. This work
is aimed to overcome this disadvantage using heuristic optimization algorithms.
In order to facilitate the portability of the software, we use the Insight Segmentation and
Registration Toolkit (ITK)1, which is a set of libraries in C++ designed for the development of
registration methods [4]. One of the advantages of this library consists in the possibility of
compare different methods and implementations.
As an example of how a local optima can introduce errors in the solution of the algorithm, let
consider the Mean Squares as a metric and the Regular Step Gradient Descent as the
optimizer. The results are presented at Figure 1 where images (a) and (b) are input images of
different modalities, the first one being the fixed image and the second one the moving image.
At (c) both images are superimposed before the registration process while (d) is the result of
applying the method. It can be clearly seen that the scale was not corrected, thus, the registration
was not performed successfully.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

Figure 1: (a) fixed image; (b) moving image; (c) the images (a) and (b) are overlapped before
registration; (d) the images (a) and (b) after registration using Mean Squares and Regular Step
Gradient Descent approaches; (e) images (a) and (b) after registration using Mattes Mutual
Information and Extremal Optimization.

http://www.itk.org
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ISSN 1984-8218

To overcome the problem mentioned above, we developed and added a new optimizer into
the ITK libraries set as a new class, in which it was implemented the heuristic algorithm
Extremal Optimization (EO) [1]. To implement the EO algorithm for our IR problem, we define
an individual fitness i considering each point i as one of the transformation parameters. The
fitness i is a measure of how good is a specific parameter. By simplicity, the i values are
normalized in the range [0, 1]. In addition, a neighborhood N(S) is defined using a variable
radius around the best current solution (a set of parameters), from which the candidate solution
is randomly selected. The cost evaluation is computed forwarding the new parameters to the
ITK registration pipeline.
The metric used is the mutual information approach, proposed by Mattes et. al. in [5],
implemented on Insight Toolkit libraries. The cost function to be optimized is shown in equation
(1). The negative of mutual information S between the reference image and the transformed test
image is expressed as a function of the transformation parameters .

(1)
where p, pT, and pR are the joint, marginal test, and marginal reference probability distributions,
respectively.
Validation of the test results were performed using images of different modalities of the
RIRE2 project database. 18 patients with 8 different imaging modalities for each one of them
were selected and 2 patients with 2 modalities from the ITK sample database. In Figure 1(e), it
can be seen the result of this new method taking as input images Figures 1 (a) and (b). Note that
both images are aligned properly.
The experimental results show that the new heuristic optimizer algorithm developed based
on the EO, combined with the MI-based metric proposed by Mattes et. al. achieve better
performance in contrast to other methods and optimization algorithms implemented in ITK,
such as "1 +1 EV". In fact, comparing with conventional methods and optimization evolutionary
algorithms already implemented ITK, the proposed MI-EO algorithm have performed the
registration of multimodal medical images with low error matching.
Finally, our study provides, to medical professionals and fellow researchers a reliable way to
perform multimodal registration of tomography images of brain, with the option of using a new
heuristic based optimizer. The methodology can be extended to the images registration of other
parts of the body.
Acknowledgement: The authors acknowledge the financial support given by CONACyT
program 1698 OC/PR.
Key words: Medical Image Registration, Mutual Information, Extremal Optimization, ITK

References
[1] S. Boettcher, A. G. Percus, Natures way of optimizing, Artificial Intelligence, vol. 119, pp.
275-286, (2000).
[2] A. El-Baz, R. Acharya, A. Laine, J. Suri (Eds.), Medical Image Registration, vol. 2,
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, New York, 2011.
[3] J. V. Hajnal, D. Hawkes, D. Hill (Eds.), Medical Image Registration, Biomedical
engineering series, CRC Press LLC, New York, 2001.
[4] L. Ibez, W. Schroeder, L.g, J. Cates, I. S. Consortium, The ITK Software Guide.
Second Edition. Updated for ITK version 2.4, 2005. URL http://www.itk.org
[5] D. Mattes, D. R. Haynor, H. Veselle, T. K. Lewellen, W. Eubank, Pet/CT Image registration
in the chest using free-form deformations, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol 22
pp. 120-128, (2003).
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