Retrospective evaluation of inter-subject brain registration

Abstract

Although numerous methods to register brains of different individuals have been proposed, few work has been done to evaluate the performances of different registration methods on the same database of subjects. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework, based on global and local measures of the quality of the registration. Experiments have been conducted for 5 methods, through a database of 18 subjects. We focused more extensively on the registration of cortical landmarks that have a particular relevance in the context of anatomical-functional normalization. For global measures, results show that the quality of the registration is directly related to the transformation’s degrees of freedom. However, local measures based on the matching of cortical sulci, did not make it possible to show significant differences between affine and non linear methods.