Affiliations: [a] ELIS, MEDISIP, IBITECH, University of Gent, Gent, Belgium | [b] Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Gent, Gent, Belgium | [c] Department of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, University Hospital Gent, Gent, Belgium
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Y. D’Asseler, M. Sc., Division of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Gent, De Pintelaan 185, B-9000 Gent, Belgium. Tel.: +32 9 240 30 28; Fax: +32 9 240 38 07; E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: A PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) is a system that is able to store, exchange, display and manipulate images and associated diagnoses from any modality within a hospital in a timely and cost-effective way. Several developments, such as the DICOM standard, fast and convenient networking, and new storage solutions for large amounts of data, make the setup of such a PACS system possible. As the information acquired with various imaging modalities is then available and often complementary, it is desirable for the clinician to have a point-by-point spatial co-registration of images from different modalities in order to enable a synergistic use of the multimodality imaging of a patient for increased diagnostic accuracy. Various types of algorithms are available for the matching of medical images from the same or from different modalities. Co-registration algorithms based on voxel properties consist of a similarity or dissimilarity measure and an iterative or non-iterative method minimizing the dissimilarity or maximizing the similarity between the two images by a transformation of one image relative to the other.
