MRI modalitiy transformation in demon registration

Abstract

Nonrigid local image registration plays an important role in medical imaging. In this paper we focus on demon registration which is introduced by Thirion [1], and is comparable to fluid registration. Because demon registration cannot deal with multiple MRI modalities, we introduce a MRI modality transformation which changes the representation of a T1 scan into a T2 scan using the peaks in a joint histogram. We compare the performance between demon registration with modality transformation, demon registration with gradient images and Rueckerts [2] B-spline based free form deformation method in combination with mutual information. For this test we use perfectly aligned T1 and T2 slices from the BrainWeb database [3], which we local spherically distort. In conclusion demon registration with modality transformation gives the smallest registration errors, in case of local large spherical distortions and small bias fields.