3D multi-modal registration for assessing molecular activity changes in time-dependent geometries

An important issue for in-vivo fluorescence molecular imaging and tomography has been the robust registration of animals imaged at different time points in order to improve the accuracy of monitoring fluorophore distribution. This paper presents a novel automatic method for aligning 3D temporal data of small animals based on the robust detection of surface anatomical features. Since it is based on 3D surface landmarks the method can be used for mono-modal or multi-modal X-ray CT and/or Optical tomography data in order to account for differences in the positioning and compression of small animals. It can be further extended to other imaging modalities, as well.