title: MR to CT Registration of Brains using Image Synthesis.
abstract: Computed tomography (CT) is the standard imaging modality for patient dose calculation for radiation therapy. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging (MRI) is used along with CT to identify brain structures due to its superior soft tissue contrast. Registration of MR and CT is necessary for accurate delineation of the tumor and other structures, and is critical in radiotherapy planning. Mutual information (MI) or its variants are typically used as a similarity metric to register MRI to CT. However, unlike CT, MRI intensity does not have an accepted calibrated intensity scale. Therefore, MI-based MR-CT registration may vary from scan to scan as MI depends on the joint histogram of the images. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic framework for MR-CT registration by synthesizing a synthetic CT image from MRI using a co-registered pair of MR and CT images as an atlas. Patches of the subject MRI are matched to the atlas and the synthetic CT patches are estimated in a probabilistic framework. The synthetic CT is registered to the original CT using a deformable registration and the computed deformation is applied to the MRI. In contrast to most existing methods, we do not need any manual intervention such as picking landmarks or regions of interests. The proposed method was validated on ten brain cancer patient cases, showing 25% improvement in MI and correlation between MR and CT images after registration compared to state-of-the-art registration methods.
authors: Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Henry M. Jackson Foundation.
authors: Snehashis
authors: S
authors: Roy
authors: Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory, The Johns Hopkins University.
authors: Aaron
authors: A
authors: Carass
authors: Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory, The Johns Hopkins University.
authors: Amod
authors: A
authors: Jog
authors: Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory, The Johns Hopkins University.
authors: Jerry L
authors: JL
authors: Prince
authors: Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
authors: Junghoon
authors: J
authors: Lee
keywords: CT; MRI; brain; hallucination; histogram matching; image synthesis; intensity normalization; magnetic resonance imaging; patches