# Slice-to-volume medical image registration: a survey

## TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews slice-to-volume medical image registration methods, categorizing algorithms, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and discussing future research directions in this challenging field.

## Contribution

First extensive survey on slice-to-volume registration, providing a taxonomy, comparative analysis, and future perspectives for this specialized area.

## Key findings

- Categorized existing algorithms and their advantages/disadvantages.
- Identified gaps and challenges in current methods.
- Outlined future research directions.

## Abstract

During the last decades, the research community of medical imaging has witnessed continuous advances in image registration methods, which pushed the limits of the state-of-the-art and enabled the development of novel medical procedures. A particular type of image registration problem, known as slice-to-volume registration, played a fundamental role in areas like image guided surgeries and volumetric image reconstruction. However, to date, and despite the extensive literature available on this topic, no survey has been written to discuss this challenging problem. This paper introduces the first comprehensive survey of the literature about slice-to-volume registration, presenting a categorical study of the algorithms according to an ad-hoc taxonomy and analyzing advantages and disadvantages of every category. We draw some general conclusions from this analysis and present our perspectives on the future of the field.