Patent ID: 8538108

Claim:
A method for elastic registration of multiple scans of internal properties of a body, comprising the steps of: receiving control point transformation data that indicates a vector φ of values for transform parameters for each control point of a plurality of control points that correspond to scan elements in a reference scan, wherein the vector φ of values for transform parameters for a particular control point indicates how to associate the particular control point with one or more scan elements in a floating scan different from the reference scan, and every scan element in the reference scan has a position indicated by a plurality of coordinate values for a corresponding plurality of dimensions; determining a plurality of subsets of contiguous scan elements in the reference scan, wherein each subset of contiguous scan elements is associated with only one control point; determining on a processor an output vector v of values for transform parameters for each scan element in a first subset of scan elements of the reference scan, including the steps of determining a first cubic B-spline coefficient coef1=ΣB(w1) φ for a first coordinate value of a scan element in the first subset a distance w1 from a control point along a first dimension of the plurality of dimensions summed over four control points, and determining a plurality of cubic B-spline coefficients coef2=ΣB(w2) coef1 for a corresponding plurality of coordinate values of a plurality of scan elements in the first subset a distance w2 from a control point along a different second dimension of the plurality of dimensions each summed over four control points, and determining v based at least in part on coef2 for each scan element in the first subset; and after determining the output vector v of values for each scan element in the first subset, then determining on a processor the output vector v of values for each scan element in a different second subset of scan elements of the reference scan, wherein B(n) is a well known function for contributions at an arbitrary point from a control point at a normalized distance n=d/s where d is distance from the control point to the arbitrary point and s is separation of adjacent control points that straddle the arbitrary point.