A comparison of seven methods of within-subjects rigid-body pedobarographic image registration

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Image registration, the process of transforming images such that homologous structures optimally overlap, provides the pre-processing foundation for pixel-level functional image analysis. The purpose of this study was to compare the performances of seven methods of within-subjects pedobarographic image registration: (1) manual, (2) principal axes, (3) centre of pressure trajectory, (4) mean squared error, (5) probability-weighted variance, (6) mutual information, and (7) exclusive OR. We assumed that foot-contact geometry changes were negligibly small trial-to-trial and thus that a rigid-body transformation could yield optimum registration performance. Thirty image pairs were randomly selected from our laboratory database and were registered using each method. To compensate for inter-rater variability, the mean registration parameters across 10 raters were taken as representative of manual registration. Registration performance was assessed using four dissimilarity metrics (#4–7 above). One-way MANOVA found significant differences between the methods ( p<0.001). Bonferroni post-hoc tests revealed that the centre of pressure method performed the poorest ( p<0.001) and that the principal axes method tended to perform more poorly than remaining methods ( p<0.070). Average manual registration was not different from the remaining methods ( p=1.000). The results suggest that a variety of linear registration methods are appropriate for within-subjects pedobarographic images, and that manual image registration is a viable alternative to algorithmic registration when parameters are averaged across raters. The latter finding, in particular, may be useful for cases of image peculiarities resulting from outlier trials or from experimental manipulations that induce substantial changes in contact area or pressure profile geometry.