Supine to prone colon registration and visualization based on optimal mass transport

Registration and visualization of surfaces play a significant role in the engineering and medical fields. Especially in virtual colonoscopy (VC), an efficient and robust registration method between supine and prone computed tomography (CT) scans is highly desirable, due to the fact that it helps improve polyp detection rates. However, supine and prone colon registration is still a challenging task due to the large distortion in colon shape. In this work, we present a novel registration and visualization framework for supine and prone colon scans using the optimal mass transport (OMT) theory. The proposed novel method enables parameterization of the colon surface onto the planar rectangle domain for better registration and visualization. Also, we develop novel flattened visualization of the colon wall with magnification of polyps using color-coded distance change in the 2D map. Experimental results validate our proposed registration method and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.