Individualizing anatomical atlases of the head

Abstract

This paper presents diffeomorphic transformations of 3D anatomical image data in human brains as imaged via magnetic resonance imagery. These transformations are generated in a hierarchical manner accommodating both global and local anatomical detail. The initial low-dimensional registration is accomplished by constraining the transformation to be in a low-dimensional basis. The basis is defined by the Green's function of the elasticity operator placed at predefined locations in the anatomy and the eigenfunctions of the elasticity operator. The high-dimensional, large-deformation registration is accomplished by minimizing the mismatch between the template (atlas) and target image volumes constrained by solving the Navier Stokes fluid model on a vector field.