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A hybrid registration-based method for whole-body micro-CT mice images

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Abstract

The widespread use of whole-body small animal in vivo imaging in preclinical research has proposed the new demands on imaging processing and analysis. Micro-CT provides detailed anatomical structural information for continuous detection and different individual comparison, but the body deformation happened during different data acquisition needs sophisticated registration. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method for registering micro-CT mice images, which combines the strengths of point-based and intensity-based registration methods. Point-based non-rigid method using thin-plate spline robust point matching algorithm is utilized to acquire a coarse registration. And then intensity-based non-rigid method using normalized mutual information, Halton sampling and adaptive stochastic gradient descent optimization is used to acquire precise registration. Two accuracy metrics, Dice coefficient and average surface distance are used to do the quantitative evaluation. With the intra- and intersubject micro-CT mice images registration assessment, the hybrid method has been proven capable of excellent performance on micro-CT mice images registration.

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Acknowledgments

Authors are highly thankful to Jinwang Li and Lei Xiong for their assistance during the data acquisition. We thank Prof. Hongbing Lu and Junyan Rong for their valuable help in this work. This work is supported by the Program of the National Basic Research and Development Program of China (973) under Grant No. 2011CB707702 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 81371589, 81090272 and 81101084, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Qu, X., Gao, X., Xu, X. et al. A hybrid registration-based method for whole-body micro-CT mice images. Med Biol Eng Comput 54, 1037–1048 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1386-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1386-4

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