Hi,
The general problem with (complex) symmetric distortions is that one needs to center the image on a larger canvas, before applying a generic distortion.
When you also use good panorama stitching software, like PTGUI, it can figure out and correct for very complex distortions automatically by adding a second, shifted, image. Then center on the original region of interest, and crop. This will use high-quality resampling, and can also run on 64-bit Operating systems, which may help if files become large ( >2GB).
Cheers,
Bart