3D thin-plate spline registration for Drosophila brain surface model

With the progress of model averaging algorithms, scientists in the field of brain research have an increasing demand for methods capable to register and warp source data to the pre-registered standard atlas. We here propose a thin-plate spline (TPS) based surface registration method to facilitate the registration and warping process of Drosophila brain data. Our contributions are twofold. First, the proposed method performs TPS-based registration in the parameterization domain, and hence it no longer needs a rigid transformation to globally align and scale the input models. Second, the obtained well-registered surface model can act as boundary constraints for further volumetric registration schemes. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective. For models with a 750-voxel-long bounding box diagonal, the average surface-to-surface distance is reduced to about 0.1-voxel-long after registration.