DICOM image registration using ITK

Question

I'm working on a project (VS2012 and C#) that includes image registration. I basically need to extract the points cloud from a stack of DICOM images in a directory. I've researched ActiViz, VTK, ITK etc and I can't find any example on how to do this.

Has someone been able to obtain a cloud of points using any of these libraries above? if so, can you post the code used?

Thank you!

Answer 1

It is unclear from your question how exactly is represented your point cloud in the DICOM image stack.

I suppose the points are pixels in the slices that have a particular color. In this case, the ITK Software Guide has a fully documented example about how to extract a surface from a 3D DICOM image: It is chapter "6.11 Extracting Surfaces" (link to the book).

This example uses an ITK filter that performs a thresholding step to isolate your points and then performs the surface extraction.

It is not exactly what you are asking for though: this example outputs a mesh instead of a set of points. However, in ITK a mesh is a kind of point set (class vtkMesh derives from vtkPointset) so you can get your cloud of points from there.

See also chapters "4.2 PointSet" and "4.3 Mesh" in the same book.

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can do it in ANALYZE software and extract the cloud points. https://analyzedirect.com/analyze-registration/

Let me know if you have questions about how to do it.