Methodological Research on Image Registration Based on Human Brain Tissue In Vivo

Abstract

As one of the critical steps in brain imaging analysis and processing, brain image registration plays a significant role. In this paper, we proposed a technique of human brain image registration based on tissue morphology in vivo to address the problems of previous image registration. First, different feature points were extracted and combined, including those at the boundary of different brain tissues and those of the maximum or minimum from the original image. Second, feature points were screened through eliminating their wrong matching pairs between moving image and reference image. Finally, the remaining matching pairs of feature points were used to generate the model parameters of spatial transformation, with which the brain image registration can be finished by combining interpolation techniques. Results showed that compared with the Surf, Demons, and Sift algorithms, the proposed method can perform better not only for four quantitative indicators (mean square differences, normalized cross correlation, normalized mutual information and mutual information) but also in spatial location, size, appearance contour, and registration details. The findings may suggest that the proposed method will be of great value for brain image reconstruction, fusion, and statistical comparison analysis.