Non-rigid registration of serial intra-operative images for automatic brain shift estimation

Measurement of intra-operative brain motion is important to provide boundary conditions to physics-based deformation models that can be used to register pre- and intra-operative information. In this paper we present and test a technique that can be used to measure brain surface motion automatically. This method relies on a tracked laser range scanner (LRS) that can acquire simultaneously a picture and the 3D physical coordinates of objects within its field of view. This reduces the 3D tracking problem to a 2D non-rigid registration problem which we solve with a Mutual Information-based algorithm. Results obtained on images of a phantom and on images acquired intra-operatively that demonstrate the feasibility of the method are presented.