Automatic selection of landmarks in T1-weighted head MRI with regression forests for image registration initialization

Jianing Wang; Yuan Liu; Jack H. Noble; Benoit M. Dawant

doi:10.1117/1.JMI.4.4.044005

14 November 2017 Automatic selection of landmarks in T1-weighted head MRI with regression forests for image registration initialization

Jianing Wang, Yuan Liu, Jack H. Noble, Benoit M. Dawant

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Medical Imaging, Vol. 4, Issue 4, 044005 (November 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.4.4.044005

Abstract

Medical image registration establishes a correspondence between images of biological structures, and it is at the core of many applications. Commonly used deformable image registration methods depend on a good preregistration initialization. We develop a learning-based method to automatically find a set of robust landmarks in three-dimensional MR image volumes of the head. These landmarks are then used to compute a thin plate spline-based initialization transformation. The process involves two steps: (1) identifying a set of landmarks that can be reliably localized in the images and (2) selecting among them the subset that leads to a good initial transformation. To validate our method, we use it to initialize five well-established deformable registration algorithms that are subsequently used to register an atlas to MR images of the head. We compare our proposed initialization method with a standard approach that involves estimating an affine transformation with an intensity-based approach. We show that for all five registration algorithms the final registration results are statistically better when they are initialized with the method that we propose than when a standard approach is used. The technique that we propose is generic and could be used to initialize nonrigid registration algorithms for other applications.

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Jianing Wang, Yuan Liu, Jack H. Noble, and Benoit M. Dawant "Automatic selection of landmarks in T1-weighted head MRI with regression forests for image registration initialization," Journal of Medical Imaging 4(4), 044005 (14 November 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.4.4.044005

Received: 3 February 2017; Accepted: 27 September 2017; Published: 14 November 2017

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