  Registration of partial-view 3D US volumes with MRI data is influenced by
initialization. The standard of practice is using extrinsic or intrinsic
landmarks, which can be very tedious to obtain. To overcome the limitations of
registration initialization, we present a novel approach that is based on
Euclidean distance maps derived from easily obtainable coarse segmentations. We
evaluate our approach quantitatively on the publicly available RESECT dataset
and show that it is robust regarding overlap of target area and initial
position. Furthermore, our method provides initializations that are suitable
for state-of-the-art nonlinear, deformable image registration algorithm's
capture ranges.
