Deformable, anatomical trees represented by scan data from different times are matched. Coherent point drift (CPD) solved using expectation maximization is enhanced with tangent or other curve information. By including point-curve information, another characteristic than GMM-based probabilities are included in the cost function for matching. The angle information provided by the tangent, normal, or other point-curve measure may more likely match points in one set representing a tree to points in another set representing the tree.