A Novel Feature Matching Approach for Multi-Modal Biomedical Image Registration: A Comparative Study with Intensity-based Approach

Multimodal image registration plays a crucial role in biomedical research, enabling the integration of complementary information from different imaging techniques. We present a novel feature-based approach for multimodal image registration, alongside traditional intensity-based methods. Our method, inspired by SPP-net architecture, employs multi-level feature extraction for robust image alignment. Additionally, we perform t-SNE dimensionality reduction on the MALDI-MSI dataset to enhance feature discrimination and visualization. We evaluated both approaches using datasets from the ANHIR Grand Challenge and mass spectrometry imaging modalities (LA-ICP-MS and MALDI-MSI). The proposed feature-based method achieved comparable accuracy to optimized intensity-based approaches, with Dice Coefficients of 0.95 for ANHIR samples (e.g., COAD_05) and 0.97 for mass spectrometry data, while requiring approximately 50% less computational time. Quantitative evaluation through Mutual Information metrics and Hausdorff Distance demonstrated high registration accuracy across different tissue types and imaging modalities. These results establish our feature-based approach as an efficient alternative to traditional intensity-based methods for multimodal image registration in biomedical applications.