Articulated whole-body atlases for small animal image analysis: construction and applications.
OBJECTIVE
Using three publicly available small-animal atlases (Sprague-Dawley rat, MOBY, and Digimouse), we built three articulated atlases and present several applications in the scope of molecular imaging.


METHODS
Major bones/bone groups were manually segmented for each atlas skeleton. Then, a kinematic model for each atlas was built: each joint position was identified and the corresponding degrees of freedom were specified.


RESULTS
The articulated atlases enable automated registration into a common coordinate frame of multimodal small-animal imaging data. This eliminates the postural variability (e.g., of the head, back, and front limbs) that occurs in different time steps and due to modality differences and nonstandardized acquisition protocols.


CONCLUSIONS
The articulated atlas proves to be a useful tool for multimodality image combination, follow-up studies, and image processing in the scope of molecular imaging. The proposed models were made publicly available.
Khmelinskii
Artem
A
Division of Image Processing (LKEB), Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Leiden, The Netherlands.
Baiker
Martin
M
Kaijzel
Eric L
EL
Chen
Josette
J
Reiber
Johan H C
JH
Lelieveldt
Boudewijn P F
BP
D000818:Animals; D001271:Atlases as Topic; D001842:Bone and Bones / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D051379:Mice; D008809:Mice, Inbred C3H; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley
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