Incorporating statistical measures of anatomical variability in atlas-to-subject registration for conformal brain radiotherapy.
Deforming a digital atlas towards a patient image allows the simultaneous segmentation of several structures. Such an intersubject registration is difficult as the deformations to recover are highly inhomogeneous. A priori information about the local amount of deformation to expect is precious, since it allows to optimally balance the quality of the matching versus the regularity of the deformation. However, intersubject variability makes it hard to heuristically estimate the degree of deformation. Indeed, the sizes and shapes of various structures differ greatly and their relative positions vary in a rather complex manner. In this article, we perform a statistical study of the deformations yielded by the registration of an image database with an anatomical atlas, and we propose methods to re-inject this information into the registration. We show that this provides more accurate segmentations of brain structures.
Commowick
Olivier
O
INRIA Sophia - Epidaure Project, 2004 Route des Lucioles BP 9306902 Sophia Antipolis, France. Olivier.Commowick@sophia.inria.fr
Stefanescu
Radu
R
Fillard
Pierre
P
Arsigny
Vincent
V
Ayache
Nicholas
N
Pennec
Xavier
X
Malandain
Grégoire
G