2D/3D registration of neonatal brain images

Abstract

Recently, it is shown the morphology of the white matter, obtained by ultrasound (US) imaging, has prognostic implications for certain brain pathologies. Periventricular Leukomalacia (PVL) is such a pathology diagnosed on infants with a very low birth weight (< 1500g). Next to the US images Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) volumes are commonly used for the inspection of this pathology. Since on both modalities, up to now, we still lack a golden standard for the quantification of the syndrome cross-validation through a multi-modal registration is highly beneficial to the clinical diagnosis. In this article we present a 2D US - 3D MRI registration scheme combining an interactive initialization step, B-spline image interpolation, a mutual information based metric and an evolutionary algorithm optimization scheme. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.