Non-rigid atlas to subject registration with pathologies for conformal brain radiotherapy

Abstract

Warping a digital atlas toward a patient image allows the simultaneous segmentation of several structures. This may be of great interest for cerebral images, since the brain contains a large number of small but important structures (optical nerves, grey nuclei, etc.). One important application is the conformal radiotherapy of cerebral tumor, where a precise delineation of all these structures is required. However, in this case, the variability induced by the tumor or a surgical resection, that are not present in the digital atlas, prevents an accurate registration between the atlas and the patient images. Since our registration method allows to locally control the amount of regularization, we are able to explicitly introduce those areas in the warping process. For computational efficiency, we have created a parallel implementation that can be used from the clinical environment through a grid interface. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.