Joint registration and segmentation of neuroanatomic structures from brain MRI

Segmentation of anatomic structures from magnetic resonance brain scans can be a daunting task because of large inhomogeneities in image intensities across an image and possible lack of precisely defined shape boundaries for certain anatomical structures. One approach that has been quite popular in the recent past for these situations is the atlas-based segmentation. The atlas, once constructed, can be used as a template and can be registered nonrigidly to the image being segmented thereby achieving the desired segmentation. The goal of our study is to segment these structures with a registration assisted image segmentation technique.

We present a novel variational formulation of the registration assisted image segmentation problem which leads to solving a coupled set of nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that are solved using efficient numeric schemes. Our work is a departure from earlier methods in that we can simultaneously register and segment in three dimensions and easily cope with situations where the source (atlas) and target images have very distinct intensity distributions.

We present several examples (20) on synthetic and (3) real data sets along with quantitative accuracy estimates of the registration in the synthetic data case.

The proposed atlas-based segmentation technique is capable of simultaneously achieve the nonrigid registration and the segmentation; unlike previous methods of solution for this problem, our algorithm can accommodate for image pairs having very distinct intensity distributions.