Techniques for accelerated elastic registration include receiving reference scan data and floating scan data, and a first transformation for mapping coordinates of scan elements from the first scan to coordinates of scan elements in the second scan. A subset of contiguous scan elements is determined. At least one of several enhancements is implemented. In one enhancement cubic spline interpolation is nested by dimensions within a subset. In another enhancement, a local joint histogram of mutual information based on the reference scan data and the floating scan data for the subset is determined and subtracted from an overall joint histogram to determine a remainder joint histogram. Each subset is then transformed, used to compute an updated local histogram, and added to the remainder joint histogram to produce an updated joint histogram. In another enhancement, a measure of similarity other than non-normalized mutual information is derived from the updated joint histogram.
