Simultaneous registration of structural and diffusion weighed images using the full DTI information

Abstract

Banks of high-quality, multimodal neurological images offer new possibilities for analyses based on brain registration. To take full advantage of these, current algorithms should be significantly enhanced. We present here a new brain registration method driven simultaneously by the structural intensity and the total diffusion information of MRI scans. Using the two modalities together allows for a better alignment of general and specific aspects of the anatomy. Furthermore, keeping the full diffusion tensor in the cost function, rather than only some of its scalar measures, will allow for a thorough statistical analysis once the Jacobian of the transformation is obtained.

Multi-channel Registration for Diffusion MRI: Longitudinal Analysis for the Neonatal Brain

“…Multi-channel registration that includes both anatomical and diffusion channels has been shown to improve registration and label-propagation results [2,7,19]. The reported MC registration solutions generally employ fractional anisotropy (FA) [7,8,14,19] or DTI [2,9,13] as an additional channel. However, DTI-extracted metrics are characterised by inconsistencies in fibrecrossing regions.…”

“…The classical approach for the fusion of information from different channels is based on simple averaging of individual channel updates [2]. More recently proposed solutions include scalar weighs for ROIs defined by thresholded FA maps [13] or local certainty maps based on normalised gradients correlated to structural content [7]. While the detailed overview of the choice of registration metrics is out-of-scope of this work, it can be summarised that the published works on intensity-based multi-channel registration primarily use the sum of squared differences (SSD) [2,7,8,14] or local normalised cross-correlation (LNCC) [4] metrics.…”