Patent ID: 7657073

Claim:
A computer-readable medium storing a computer program implementing method steps for registering nodules in medical images, said method steps comprising: a) preprocessing said medical images, comprising: segmenting structures of interest into source and target volumes; deriving three-dimensional (3D) bounding boxes from said volumes; and estimating a location of a target nodule from said bounding boxes; b) optimizing said location, comprising: determining possible regions for said target nodule; mapping 3D coordinates of points in each region to a 1D index; and in the 1D index space, finding an optimized location that has the maximum Tunable Cross-Correlation (TCC) coefficient with a sphere containing a source nodule; and c) optimizing said TCC coefficient, comprising: using the negative of the TCC coefficient as an energy function for a Very Fast Simulated Annealing (VFSA) algorithm; augmenting said VFSA algorithm with a re-annealing schedule and an anti-local-maximum procedure; and controlling gradient of TCC changes with respect to shift, thereby improving registration accuracy.