Non-rigid point cloud registration based lung motion estimation using tangent-plane distance

PLoS One. 2018 Sep 26;13(9):e0204492. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204492. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Accurate estimation of motion field in respiration-correlated 4DCT images, is a precondition for the analysis of patient-specific breathing dynamics and subsequent image-supported treatment planning. However, the lung motion estimation often suffers from the sliding motion. In this paper, a novel lung motion method based on the non-rigid registration of point clouds is proposed, and the tangent-plane distance is used to represent the distance term, which describes the difference between two point clouds. Local affine transformation model is used to express the non-rigid deformation of the lung motion. The final objective function is expressed in the Frobenius norm formation, and matrix optimization scheme is carried out to find out the optimal transformation parameters that minimize the objective function. A key advantage of our proposed method is that it alleviates the requirement that the source point cloud and the reference point cloud should be in one-to-one corresponding relationship, and the requirement is difficult to be satisfied in practical application. Furthermore, the proposed method takes the sliding motion of the lung into consideration and improves the registration accuracy by reducing the constraint of the motion along the tangent direction. Non-rigid registration experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed method using popi-model data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the traditional method with about 20% accuracy increase.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Biomechanical Phenomena
  • Computer Simulation
  • Four-Dimensional Computed Tomography / methods*
  • Four-Dimensional Computed Tomography / statistics & numerical data
  • Humans
  • Lung / diagnostic imaging*
  • Lung / physiology*
  • Models, Anatomic
  • Movement / physiology
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / statistics & numerical data
  • Respiration*
  • Respiratory Mechanics / physiology

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51635007, 51327801), the Outstanding Youth Foundation of Hubei Province (No. 2017CFA045), and the Wuhan Applied Basic Research Project (No. 2017010201010139). The funders had no role in study design, data collectionand analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.