Non-rigid Registration of White Matter Tractography Using Coherent Point Drift Algorithm

Axonal fibers in the white matter are in charge of bio-signal delivery and relate information between neurons within the nervous system and between neurons and peripheral target tissues. Tract-based analysis (TBA) can directly bridge white matter and its connected cerebral cortex to achieve a joint analysis of the brain’s structure and function. However, the accuracy of TBA is highly dependent on the quality of spatial registration of fiber bundles of different individuals to the standard space. In this paper, a non-rigid point registration, Coherent Point Drift (CPD), is applied for registration of fiber bundles. Both the fiber features and the registration accuracy are evaluated to determine the correspondence among fiber bundles. Experiment results on twelve real data showed higher registration accuracy of the proposed method on mean nearest neighbor distance and fractional anisotropy (FA) profiles than traditional registration methods, such as affine, elastic and Iterative Closest Point (ICP).

[1]  Arthur W. Toga,et al.  Fast Diffusion Tensor Registration with Exact Reorientation and Regularization , 2012, MICCAI.

[2]  Carl-Fredrik Westin,et al.  Statistical analysis of fiber bundles using multi-tensor tractography: application to first-episode schizophrenia. , 2011, Magnetic resonance imaging.

[3]  Anna Varentsova,et al.  Development of a high angular resolution diffusion imaging human brain template , 2014, NeuroImage.

[4]  Klaus H. Maier-Hein,et al.  Methodological considerations on tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) , 2014, NeuroImage.

[5]  Stephen T. C. Wong,et al.  Simultaneous Tensor and Fiber Registration (STFR) for Diffusion Tensor Images of the Brain , 2013, AE-CAI.

[6]  Jan Sijbers,et al.  Affine Coregistration of Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Images Using Mutual Information , 2005, ACIVS.

[7]  Frans Vos,et al.  Nonrigid Point Set Matching of White Matter Tracts for Diffusion Tensor Image Analysis , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[8]  Carl-Fredrik Westin,et al.  The white matter query language: a novel approach for describing human white matter anatomy , 2015, Brain Structure and Function.

[9]  Darshan Pai,et al.  Evaluation of fiber bundles across subjects through brain mapping and registration of diffusion tensor data , 2011, NeuroImage.

[10]  Andriy Myronenko,et al.  Point Set Registration: Coherent Point Drift , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[11]  Arthur W. Toga,et al.  Atlas-guided tract reconstruction for automated and comprehensive examination of the white matter anatomy , 2010, NeuroImage.

[12]  Sang Wook Lee,et al.  ICP Registration Using Invariant Features , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[13]  Colin Studholme,et al.  An overlap invariant entropy measure of 3D medical image alignment , 1999, Pattern Recognit..

[14]  Carl-Fredrik Westin,et al.  Improving Registration Using Multi-channel Diffeomorphic Demons Combined with Certainty Maps , 2011, MBIA.

[15]  R Bakshi,et al.  The Impact of Lesion In-Painting and Registration Methods on Voxel-Based Morphometry in Detecting Regional Cerebral Gray Matter Atrophy in Multiple Sclerosis , 2012, American Journal of Neuroradiology.

[16]  Cristina Scarpazza,et al.  Voxel-based morphometry: current perspectives , 2016 .

[17]  Yu-Chun Lo,et al.  Automatic whole brain tract‐based analysis using predefined tracts in a diffusion spectrum imaging template and an accurate registration strategy , 2015, Human brain mapping.

[18]  Hayit Greenspan,et al.  A Supervised Framework for the Registration and Segmentation of White Matter Fiber Tracts , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[19]  A. Yendiki,et al.  Tract-based analysis of white matter degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease , 2015, Neuroscience.

[20]  Thomas E. Nichols,et al.  Seeking Optimal Region-Of-Interest (ROI) Single-Value Summary Measures for fMRI Studies in Imaging Genetics , 2016, PloS one.

[21]  Yu Shen,et al.  Evaluations of diffusion tensor image registration based on fiber tractography , 2017, Biomedical engineering online.