Deformable image registration with geometric changes

Geometric changes present a number of difficulties in deformable image registration. In this paper, we propose a global deformation framework to model geometric changes whilst promoting a smooth transformation between source and target images. To achieve this, we have developed an innovative model which significantly reduces the side effects of geometric changes in image registration, and thus improves the registration accuracy. Our key contribution is the introduction of a sparsity-inducing norm, which is typically L1 norm regularization targeting regions where geometric changes occur. This preserves the smoothness of global transformation by eliminating local transformation under different conditions. Numerical solutions are discussed and analyzed to guarantee the stability and fast convergence of our algorithm. To demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of this method, we evaluate it on both synthetic data and real data from traumatic brain injury (TBI). We show that the transformation estimated from our model is able to reconstruct the target image with lower instances of error than a standard elastic registration model.