IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 22, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2003 1341

Image Registration
A SUBSTANTIAL part of the research on medical image
processing is currently covered by image registration. In
order to illustrate the growth of the medical image registration
field over the past decades, we have searched the literature for
the number of journal publications on this topic. Fig. 1 presents
the number of hits we found in PubMed for “image AND reg-
istration,” from 1988 until last year. Because PubMed excludes
some methodological journals, we have performed a similar
search in the ISI Web of Science database, with the added con-
straint that the publication contains either the term “medical”
or “clinical.” Naturally, some publications will be missed, but
assuming that these omissions are consistent throughout the
years, Fig. 1 reflects the general trend. Obviously, the medical
image registration research field has grown rapidly in the last Fig. 1. Publications on image registration.
ten years. The results from both search engines show a notice-
able increase in the early 1990s. This could possibly be caused
by the more widespread availability of publications online.
However, we see the same trend in the number of publications
in the survey by Maintz and Viergever [1], which we know was
conducted without the aid of online search engines.
In a similar manner, we can detect trends in topics within
the field of medical image registration. Fig. 2, for example,
shows the distribution of publications across a number of dif-
ferent modalities. The search was performed in PubMed and
the results were normalized with respect to the total number
of publications for the corresponding year (cf. Fig. 1). Publica-
tions on multimodal registration were included for both modal-
ities involved, which explains the occurrence of histogram bars Fig. 2. Percentages of image registration publications per modality.
with a length of more than 1. Bars are shorter than 1 for years
that saw many publications on modalities other than the six se-
lected. The figure shows that the percentages of publications on
computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) are rather constant through the years. Positron emission
tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed to-
mography (SPECT), on the other hand, seem to loose ground to
newly emerging functional imaging techniques, such as func-
tional MRI (fMRI). Clearly enjoying an increase in interest is
registration of ultrasound (US) images.
Two topics in image registration that are currently considered
“hot” are intraoperative and elastic registration. A query of
PubMed for publications containing the terms “image” and
“registration” and either “intraoperative” or “image-guided”
yielded the results in Fig. 3. This graph shows the number Fig. 3. Publications on intraoperative image registration.
of publications per year both as an absolute number and as
a percentage of the total number of publications on image
and “registration” in combination with any of the following:
registration. Although the interest in intraoperative registration
“curved,” “nonrigid,” “nonlinear,” “deformable,” “elastic,” or
strongly increased in the late 1990s, there seems to be a slight
“warping.” The results of querying PubMed in this manner are
relative decrease in recent years.
plotted in Fig. 4. They indicate that elastic registration is indeed
Elastic registration is known by many different names,
a popular topic, reaching the highest numbers so far in 2002.
forcing us to search for publications containing both “image”
With image registration being such an active research field,
we imagined it might be feasible to fill a special issue on the
topic. The number of submissions for this special issue sur-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMI.2003.819272 passed our wildest dreams: 49. Each manuscript was reviewed
0278-0062/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
1342
Fig. 4. Publications on elastic image registration.
by three or four experts, from both medical and technical fields.
We want to use this editorial to express our sincere gratitude to
all 124 reviewers for their efforts and for helping us complete
the special issue in time. The cliché, “we could not have done it
without you,” definitely applies.
In a way, the number of submissions also surpassed our worst
nightmares, because finding reviewers we had not already asked
was becoming rather problematic after a while. We are espe-
cially grateful to reviewers who helped us out two, three, or even
four times.
Three papers that were not submitted specifically to the spe-
cial issue, but that did fit the topic of registration, were added to
this issue at the request of the authors or of the Editor-in-Chief.
Our thanks go to the associate editors of those papers, C. Meyer
and D. Hawkes, for alleviating our task.
To give you an impression of the contents of this issue, we
present below a quote from each paper, capturing a character-
istic of the paper without revealing all. We hope the quotes will
tickle your curiosity and entice you to read the papers.
“Optimal efficiency is achieved by performing the alignment
in dividing plane coordinates, with and spanning the di-
viding plane, and perpendicular to it.” (A. Gee et al.)
“After initial registration, any differences between the beads
from the two CT data sets (predeformation and postdeforma-
tion) or between those from the two US data sets were recorded
as bead movement.” (K. Lunn et al.)
“The registration enabled us to relate the position of the mea-
sured electrophysiology data to the cardiac motion.” (K. Rhode
et al.)
“Rather than using a single, fixed transformation model, dif-
ferent models are used as the bootstrap region expands, starting
from a simple model for the initial bootstrap region and grad-
ually evolving to a higher order model as the bootstrap region
grows to cover the entire image overlap region.” (C. Stewart et
al.)
“In our experiments, the ground-truth bone position for the
in vitro and cadaver experiments are obtained from implanted
fiducials by contact-based registration.” (H. Livyatan et al.)
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 22, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2003
“When more than one X-ray image is used for registration,
the criterion function is a sum of criteria functions of individual
images.” (D. Tomaževič et al.)
“The dominance of edges created by the projected vasculature
in these images might indicate why these measures perform so
much better than the others.” (J. Hipwell et al.)
“The solution gives the rigid-body motion increment ( ) and
activation ( ) that minimizes the sum of squared residuals be-
tween and , accounting for both motion and BOLD contrast
in parallel.” (J. Orchard et al.)
“The distance in the image matrix between annotations in
temporal pairs turned out to be smaller for lesions in CC views
than in MLO views both before and after registration.” (S. van
Engeland et al.)
“ROC analysis was used to evaluate the capacity of the pro-
posed measures to screen registration quality.” (C. Rodriguez
and M. Loew)
“To avoid error propagation and impose constraints on the
vasodilation dynamics, a Kalman filter is employed in order to
improve the estimation of the initial registration parameters.”
(A. Frangi et al.)
“This requires identifying regions where the two images are
not well registered at the current level and adjusting the defor-
mation field over these regions.” (G. Rohde et al.)
“This method of surface-based registration that we applied
was specially designed for registration of large volume histo-
logical data in neurobiology settings.” (S. Gefen et al.)
“The principal transformation components model the trans-
formation in accordance with the actually observed deforma-
tions, allowing for a more physical approach to the registration
problem.” (D. Loeckx et al.)
Finally, we would like to thank the editorial trinity of the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING. Michael Vannier,
for granting us the opportunity and for his suggestions and ad-
vice in the early stages. His successor, Max Viergever, for fur-
ther advice and for fast processing of our recommendations.
And Kathy Escher, for all her efforts in handling the adminis-
trative side of publishing a journal issue.
We hope you will enjoy this issue
JOSIEN P. W. PLUIM
University Medical Center Utrecht
Utrecht, 3584 CX The Netherlands
J. MICHAEL FITZPATRICK
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37203 USA
REFERENCES
[1] J. B. A. Maintz and M. A. Viergever, “A survey of medical image regis-
tration,” Med. Image Anal., vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–36, 1998.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 22, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2003 1343

Josien P.W. Pluim (M’02) received the Master’s degree in computer science from the Univer-
sity of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1996. For her Master’s thesis she spent six
months at the Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Nether-
lands. She continued her research there as a Ph.D. degree student, working on the topic of mutual
information based image registration. She received the Ph.D. degree in 2001.
She is currently an Assistant Professor and Head of the Image Registration Research Group
with the Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht. In 2002, she spent several
months with the Image Processing and Analysis Group at Yale University, New Haven, CT. Her
research interests are related to image registration and cover both methodology and clinical ap-
plications, particularly of neurological data.

J. Michael Fitzpatrick (A’02) received the Ph.D. degree in physics from the Florida State Uni-
versity, Tallahassee, in 1972, and the M.S. degree in computer science from the University of
North Carolina, in 1982.
From 1973 to 1974, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of British Columbia, Van-
couver, BC, Canada, in chemical physics and from 1974 to 1980 he was Professor of Physics at
Newberry College, Newberry, SC. Since 1982, he has been on the faculty of Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, Nashville, TN, where he is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science and holds additional positions of Professor of Neurological
Surgery and Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences. At Vanderbilt he directed the
Computer Science Image Processing Laboratory from 1986 to 2000 and has been codirector of the
Medical Image Processing Laboratory since 2000. He has been principal investigator for the Na-
tional Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Retrospective Registration Evaluation Project since
1995, is coeditor of SPIE Handbook on Medical Imaging (Volume 2) (Bellingham, WA: SPIE)
and has been co-chair of the Image Processing Conference at the annual SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium since 2002. He is
author or co-author of more than 100 scientific papers and 11 patents in the areas of physics and medical imaging. His current
primary research interests include image registration and the correction of distortion in magnetic resonance images.
Dr. Fitzpatrick is a member of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.