An innovative multimodal/multispectral image registration method for medical images based on the expectation-maximization algorithm

In this paper, we present a methodology for multimodal/multispectral image registration of medical images. This approach is formulated by using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) methodology, such that we estimate the parameters of a geometric transformation that aligns multimodal/multispectral images. In this framework, the hidden random variables are associated to the intensity relations between the studied images, which allow to compare multispectral intensity values between images of different modalities. The methodology is basically composed by an iterative two-step procedure, where at each step, a new estimation of the joint conditional multispectral intensity distribution and the geometric transformation is computed. The proposed algorithm was tested with different kinds of medical images, and the obtained results show that the proposed methodology can be used to efficiently align multimodal/multispectral medical images.