Non-Parametric Bayesian Registration (NParBR) of Body Tumors in DCE-MRI Data

The identification of tumors in the internal organs of chest, abdomen, and pelvis anatomic regions can be performed with the analysis of Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) data. The contrast agent is accumulated differently by pathologic and healthy tissues and that results in a temporally varying contrast in an image series. The internal organs are also subject to potentially extensive movements mainly due to breathing, heart beat, and peristalsis. This contributes to making the analysis of DCE-MRI datasets challenging as well as time consuming. To address this problem we propose a novel pairwise non-rigid registration method with a Non-Parametric Bayesian Registration (NParBR) formulation. The NParBR method uses a Bayesian formulation that assumes a model for the effect of the distortion on the joint intensity statistics, a non-parametric prior for the restored statistics, and also applies a spatial regularization for the estimated registration with Gaussian filtering. A minimally biased intra-dataset atlas is computed for each dataset and used as reference for the registration of the time series. The time series registration method has been tested with 20 datasets of liver, lungs, intestines, and prostate. It has been compared to the B-Splines and to the SyN methods with results that demonstrate that the proposed method improves both accuracy and efficiency.