A Method for Non-Rigid Registration of Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Images

摘要

The aim of this study was to examine the registration of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images. A method for estimating a smooth, continuous mapping between two tensor images is presented. This method includes a tensor-to-tensor measure of similarity as well as a neighborhood similarity measure intended to preserve the relative position of adjacent structures. Additionally, tensor reorientation is integrated into the algorithm in order to insure that the structural information provided by the diffusion tensor is retained. This method was tested on a variety of synthetic data sets. Experiments indicate that the orientation similarity term plays an important role in both accuracy and speed. Additionally, an investigation of the effect of signal to noise ratio (SNR) was conducted to insure the usefulness of the methods at clinically obtainable values. Qualitative examination of the results obtained with this method suggest its potential usefulness in the examination of in vivo human data, but some extension of the method as well as further testing will be necessary to fully understand its limitations for use on clinical data.