Nonlinear 3-D Magnetic Resonance Image Registration Using Grid Generation Techniques and Multigrid Solvers

Authors: Alexandre Coimbra, Jeffrey Saltzman and John Szumiloski Affiliation: Merck Research Laboratories
Abstract
Magnetic Resonance Imaging has become a useful tool for a variety of tasks in the pharmaceutical industry. These tasks range from understanding clinical trial outcomes to the discovery of so-called biomarkers of disease progression and/or drug efficacy. Often it is important to find a map or coordinate transformation of an image to a reference image. This process is called registration and can be set to yield a nonlinear mapping. For example, in longitudinal studies the map is useful in finding changes in morphology of important regions of the brain due to atrophy in Alzheimer?s disease progression. In this presentation we describe a registration method based on variational grid generation techniques. A variational integral is proposed and the resulting Euler-Lagrange equations are three elliptic partial differential equations. The equations are discretized and solved using a full approximation scheme multigrid method. Both numerical results and applications will be discussed.


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Last modified: Thu Nov 3 18:11:48 EST 2005