Non-rigid Registration of 3D Microscopy Images for the Normalization of Different Cell Nuclei

Abstract

We present an intensity-based approach for non-rigid registration to normalize 3D multi-channel microscopy images of different cell nuclei. A main problem with cell nuclei images is that the intensity structure of different nuclei differs very much, and thus an intensity-based scheme cannot be used directly. Instead, we first perform a segmentation of the images, smooth them by a Gaussian filter, and then apply an intensity-based algorithm. To reduce the computation time we use a multi-resolution scheme. Our approach has been successfully applied using 2D cell-like synthetic images, 3D phantom images, as well as 3D multi-channel microscopy images representing different chromosome regions and gene regions (BACs).