The Design of SuperElastix — A Unifying Framework for a Wide Range of Image Registration Methodologies

A large diversity of image registration methodologies has emerged from the research community. The scattering of methods over toolboxes impedes rigorous comparison to select the appropriate method for a given application. Toolboxes typically tailor their implementations to a mathematical registration paradigm, which makes internal functionality nonexchangeable. Subsequently, this forms a barrier for adoption of registration technology in the clinic. We therefore propose a unifying, role-based software design that can integrate a broad range of functional registration components. These components can be configured into an algorithmic network via a single highlevel user interface. A generic component handshake mechanism provides users feedback on incompatibilities. We demonstrate the viability of our design by incorporating two paradigms from different code bases. The implementation is done in C++ and is available as open source. The progress of embedding more paradigms can be followed via https://github.com/kaspermarstal/SuperElastix.