A parameterization of deformation fields for diffeomorphic image registration and its application to myocardial delineation.

This study investigates a new parameterization of deformation fields for image registration. Instead of standard displacements, this parameterization describes a deformation field with its transformation Jacobian and curl of end velocity field. It has two important features which make it appealing to image registration: 1) it relaxes the need of an explicit regularization term and the corresponding ad hoc weight in the cost functional; 2) explicit constraints on transformation Jacobian such as topology preserving and incompressibility constraints are straightforward to impose in a unified framework. In addition, this parameterization naturally describes a deformation field in terms of radial and rotational components, making it especially suited for processing cardiac data. We formulate diffeomorphic image registration as a constrained optimization problem which we solve with a step-then-correct strategy. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated with several examples and a comprehensive evaluation of myocardial delineation over 120 short-axis cardiac cine MRIs acquired from 20 subjects. It shows competitive performance in comparison to two recent segmentation based approaches.