Elastic image registration using attractive and repulsive particle swarm optimization

Elastic image registration plays an important role in medical image registration. For elastic image registration based on landmarks of sub-images, optimization algorithm is applied to extract landmarks. But local maxima of similarity measure make optimization difficult to convergence to global maximum. The registration error will lead to location error of landmarks and lead to unexpected elastic transformation results. In this paper, an elastic image registration method using attractive and repulsive particle swarm optimization (ARPSO) is proposed. For each subimage, rigid registration is done using ARPSO. In attractive phase, particles converge to promise regions in the search space. In repulsive phase, particles are repelled each other along opposition directions and new particles are created, which might avoid premature greatly. Next, thin plate spline transformation is used for the elastic interpolation between landmarks. Experiments show that our method does well in the elastic image registration experiments.