Function imregcorr Technical Issue

I'm trying to use the imregcorr function to align one DAPI tissue stain with another via phase correlation in a script. This is intended to be done as part of an overall image analysis pipeline. The DAPI images themselves can be quite large (from 1.0 to 2.0 GB), though. While the imregcorr function works perfectly fine for smaller files (say 30 MB), when I try to align the larger ones, it takes forever to run and never completes and alignment. Additionally, I see the RAM usage for MATLAB climb up to around 99% when I use imregcorr for the larger files.

Is this a hardware issue that could be solved via parallel computing, or am I simply hitting the upper limits of the function?

Notes:

1. I've run into the same issue using all of the transformtypes of the function. 2. The DAPI stains images I'm trying to align are all images of the same tissue section, just slightly shifted with the same general dimensions, so it's not a case of trying to align a picture of a tennis court with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. 3. In terms of system specs, I've got an Intel® Core™ i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor as well as 48 GB of RAM.