Cluster of Workstation based Nonrigid Image Registration Using Free-Form Deformation

Nonrigid image registration plays an important role in medical application fields. Owing to its complex com- putations, it incurs high computational cost. In this paper, a parallel algorithm schema for nonrigid image registration methods that use B-splines for deformation and mutual information as a similarity measure is pro- posed. It involves a complex interplay of various steps which are analyzed in considerable detail from the view point of parallelizing registration. The algorithms are implemented on a cluster of workstations. We present some results on a 10 processor cluster of PCs and compare them with a sequential implementation. The results show that a speed up of n/2 for n processors in registering large images. The method is fully portable and seamlessly expandable.