Morphologic field warping: a volumetric deformation method for medical image registration

An automated method is proposed for anatomic standardization that elastically map one subject´s MR image to a standard reference MR image to enable inter-subject and cross-group studies. In this method, linear transformations based on bicommissural stereotaxy are first applied to grossly align the input image to the reference image. Then, an active contour model is employed to refine the contour and surface description of the input image. Based on the contour and surface correspondence established in these previous steps, a non-linear transformation is determined using the proposed weighted local reference coordinate systems to warp the input image. In this method, geometric correspondence established based on contour matching is used to control the warping and the actual image values corresponding to registered coordinates need not be similar. We tested this algorithm on various synthetic and real images for inter-subject registration of MR images