title: Slice-to-Volume Nonrigid Registration of Histological Sections to MR Images of the Human Brain.
abstract: Registration of histological images to three-dimensional imaging modalities is an important step in quantitative analysis of brain structure, in architectonic mapping of the brain, and in investigation of the pathology of a brain disease. Reconstruction of histology volume from serial sections is a well-established procedure, but it does not address registration of individual slices from sparse sections, which is the aim of the slice-to-volume approach. This study presents a flexible framework for intensity-based slice-to-volume nonrigid registration algorithms with a geometric transformation deformation field parametrized by various classes of spline functions: thin-plate splines (TPS), Gaussian elastic body splines (GEBS), or cubic B-splines. Algorithms are applied to cross-modality registration of histological and magnetic resonance images of the human brain. Registration performance is evaluated across a range of optimization algorithms and intensity-based cost functions. For a particular case of histological data, best results are obtained with a TPS three-dimensional (3D) warp, a new unconstrained optimization algorithm (NEWUOA), and a correlation-coefficient-based cost function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Osechinskiy
authors.forename: Frithjof
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kruggel