Abstract: An object of the present invention is to provide a medical image data alignment apparatus, method and program capable of aligning different kinds of image data on a tissue to be objected at high precision and in a short time. According to the present invention, a patient SPECT and a patient CT are aligned via atlas data. The atlas data is a standard of SPECT image data, and is created based on SPECT image data of a plurality of patients. The patient SPECT and the atlas data are aligned based on the correlation of image signal values thereof, and a first transformation matrix T1 is determined. The atlas data and the patient CT are aligned based on the coordinate information added to these data in advance, and a second transformation matrix T2 is determined. The patient SPECT and the patient CT are aligned using the first transformation matrix T1 and the second transformation matrix T2.

Abstract: An image-constituting element group corresponding to bone areas is selected from among a plurality of image-constituting elements that make up a three-dimensional image model, and CT values originally associated only with the selected image-constituting element group are replaced by values resulting from multiplying the original values by ¼. As a result, a distribution curve 34A denoting a frequency distribution of bone is shifted to a region of CT values that are lower than those of a distribution curve 33 denoting a frequency distribution of blood vessels. An observation image is then constructed by maximum intensity projection on the basis of three-dimensional image data after such signal value replacement.

Abstract: An object of the present invention is to provide a medical image data alignment apparatus, method and program capable of aligning different kinds of image data on a tissue to be objected at high precision and in a short time. According to the present invention, a patient SPECT and a patient CT are aligned via atlas data. The atlas data is a standard of SPECT image data, and is created based on SPECT image data of a plurality of patients. The patient SPECT and the atlas data are aligned based on the correlation of image signal values thereof, and a first transformation matrix T1 is determined. The atlas data and the patient CT are aligned based on the coordinate information added to these data in advance, and a second transformation matrix T2 is determined. The patient SPECT and the patient CT are aligned using the first transformation matrix T1 and the second transformation matrix T2.

Abstract: An image-constituting element group corresponding to bone areas is selected from among a plurality of image-constituting elements that make up a three-dimensional image model, and CT values originally associated only with the selected image-constituting element group are replaced by values resulting from multiplying the original values by 1/4. As a result, a distribution curve 34A denoting a frequency distribution of bone is shifted to a region of CT values that are lower than those of a distribution curve 33 denoting a frequency distribution of blood vessels. An observation image is then constructed by maximum intensity projection on the basis of three-dimensional image data after such signal value replacement.