Fusion of autoradiographs with an MR volume using 2-D and 3-D linear transformations

In the past years, the development of 3-D medical imaging has enabled the 3-D imaging of in vivo tissues, from an anatomical (MR, CT) or even functional (fMRI, PET, SPECT) point of view. However, despite immense technological progress, the resolution of these images is still short of the level of anatomical or functional details that in vitro imaging (e.g., histology, autoradiography) permits. The motivation of this work is to compare fMRI activations to activations observed in autoradiographic images from the same animals. We aim to fuse post-mortem autoradiographic data with a pre-mortem anatomical MR image. We first reconstruct a 3-D volume from the 2-D autoradiographic sections, coherent both in geometry and intensity. Then, this volume is fused with the MR image. This way, we ensure that the reconstructed 3-D volume can be superimposed onto the MR image that represents the reference anatomy. We demonstrate that this fusion can be achieved by using only simple global transformations (rigid and/or affine, 2-D and 3-D), while yielding very satisfactory results.