Fully Automated Multi-Modal Anatomic Atlas Generation Using 3D-Slicer

Atlases of the human body have many applications, including for instance the analysis of information from patient cohorts to evaluate the distribution of tumours and metastases. We present a 3D Slicer module that simplifies the task of generating a multi-modal atlas from anatomical and functional data. It provides for a simpler evaluation of existing image and verbose patient data by integrating a database that is automatically generated from text files and accompanies the visualization of the atlas volume. The computation of the atlas is a two step process. First, anatomical data is pairwise registered to a reference dataset with an affine initialization and a B-Spline based deformable approach. Second, the computed transformations are applied to anatomical as well as the corresponding functional data to generate both atlases. The module is validated with a publicly available soft tissue sarcoma dataset from The Cancer Imaging Archive. We show that functional data in the atlas volume correlates with the findings from the patient database.