[vtkusers] VTK CISG Registration Toolkit v1.0 prerelease

[Thomas.Hartkens]

                  Computational Imaging Science Group 
                 Prof. D.J. Hawkes and Dr. D.L.G. Hill 
                  Guy's Hopital, King's College London
                    http://www-ipg.umds.ac.uk/cisg
                             present the 

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                    VTK CISG Registration Toolkit 

                     PRERELEASE of version 1.0

            for medical single- and multimodal 3D images
                 http://www.image-registration.com
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written by T. Hartkens based on code by D. Rueckert and J. Schnabel


This software package provides two voxel-based image registration
algorithms on the basis of Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) which are
incorporated in a user-friendly command-line and graphical interface
including a visualisation tool for 3D image pairs in order to analyse
registration results. This software is implemented using the free and 
widely-used visualisation software VTK by Kitware (Visualization Toolkit;
http://www.kitware.com) a powerful visualisation pipeline for interactive 
image display. VTK needs to be installed before the VTK CISG Registration 
Toolkit can be used.

Voxel-based image registration using Normalised Mutual Information (NMI)
has been shown to register  single- and multi-modal 3D images accurately
without any user interaction [1][2].  Our group has proposed both an affine
and a non-rigid registration algorithm based on NMI, and has validated
these algorithms on range of medical applications like brain, breast, and
cardiac data [3,4,5].

We present a publicly available open-source software package that
incorporates these algorithms in a user-friendly command-line and graphical
interface including a visualisation tool for 3D image pairs in order to
analyse registration results. Beside the pure usage of registration
algorithms,  the software can be easily adjusted to specific enviroments
(e.g. including other image file formats) and can be modified for specific
applications.

The version 1.0 (prerelease) of the VTK CISG Registration Toolkit can be
now downloaded for free on 

http://www.image-registration.com

Note, this is a PRERELEASE of version 1.0. Though we have tested the
software carefully, there might be still serious bugs in it. Be aware about
this, when you are using the package! Furthermore the documentation is 
still under development. If you find any bugs in the source code or any 
errors in the documentation we would appreciate any feedback to
thomas.hartkens at kcl.ac.uk .


The VTK CISG Registration Toolkit  is free software; you can redistribute 
it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License 
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the 
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.


Best wishes,

Thomas Hartkens 



References:
[1] J. West et al. "Comparison and evaluation of retrospective
    intermodality brain image registration techniques", JCAT, vol. 21, No 4.,
    pp 554-566, 1997
 
[2] Holden M, Hill DLG, Denton ERE, Jarosz JM, Cox TCS, Goody J, Rohlfing T,
    Hawkes DJ. Voxel similarity measures for 3D serial MR image registration
    IEEE trans Med. Imag. 19(2):94-102 2000
 
[3] Studholme C, Hill DLG, Hawkes DJ (1999) "An overlap invariant entropy
    measure of 3D medical image alignment". Pattern Recognition 32, 71-86.
 
[4] Rueckert D, Sonoda LI, Hayes C, Hill DLG, Leach MO, Hawkes DJ.
    "Non-rigid Registration using Free-Form Deformations: Application to
    Breast MR Images" IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Vol. 18,
    NO. 8: 712-721, August 1999
 
[5] JA Schnabel et al., Validation of non-rigid registration using Finite
    Element Methods. Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI'01),
    LNCS 2082:344-357, Springer Verlag, 2001




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                           Thomas Hartkens 
     Division of Radiological Sciences and Medical Engineering
          Guy's, King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine
                    Guy's Hospital, London SE1 9RT 

       tel: +44 20 7955 2721        fax: +44 20 7955 4532
    mobile: +44 7967 323595
     email: thomas.hartkens at kcl.ac.uk , thomas at hartkens.de
       web: http://www-ipg.umds.ac.uk/t.hartkens
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