An Integrated Method for Large Deformable Registration of Brain Images

Large deformable registration of brain images is essential for a variety of clinical imaging applications. State-of-the-art diffeomorphic registration methods, such as large deformation diffeomorphic mapping (LDDMM), have high computational complexity and often require pre-processing to account for large, global displacements or rotations. In this paper, we present an integrated method that fuses landmark-based thin-plate splines (TPS), patch-based B-spline and partial differential equation (PDE) based registrations synergistically to achieve improved accuracy and efficiency for large deformable registration of brain image. Landmark-based TPS and patch-based B-spline were used for global affine transformation followed by deformable registration using LDDMM. The anatomical discrepancies between the source and target images were significantly reduced after TPS and B-spline based registration. As a result, the PDE based deformable registration could be done efficiently and effectively. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated using simulation and real human brain image data, which provided more accurate registration than spline or PDE-based methods. Moreover, the computational efficiency of our method was significantly better than PDE-based methods. The proposed method may be useful for handling large deformable registration of brain images in various brain imaging applications.