title: Detail-preserving construction of neonatal brain atlases in space-frequency domain.
abstract: Brain atlases are commonly utilized in neuroimaging studies. However, most brain atlases are fuzzy and lack structural details, especially in the cortical regions. This is mainly caused by the image averaging process involved in atlas construction, which often smoothes out high-frequency contents that capture fine anatomical details. Brain atlas construction for neonatal images is even more challenging due to insufficient spatial resolution and low tissue contrast. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for detail-preserving construction of population-representative atlases. Our approach combines spatial and frequency information to better preserve image details. This is achieved by performing atlas construction in the space-frequency domain given by wavelet transform. In particular, sparse patch-based atlas construction is performed in all frequency subbands, and the results are combined to give a final atlas. For enhancing anatomical details, tissue probability maps are also used to guide atlas construction. Experimental results show that our approach can produce atlases with greater structural details than existing atlases. Hum Brain Mapp 37:2133-2150, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Yuyao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Pew-Thian
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Yap
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.|Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Dinggang
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shen
mesh_terms: D001271:Atlases as Topic; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000254:growth & development; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D059906:Neuroimaging / Q000379:methods*; D058067:Wavelet Analysis
keywords: MRI template; brain atlas; frequency decomposition; image registration; neonatal brain; neonate; pediatrics; sparse representation; wavelet transform