A hybrid registration-based method for whole-body micro-CT mice images.

The widespread use of whole-body small animal in vivo imaging in preclinical research has proposed the new demands on imaging processing and analysis. Micro-CT provides detailed anatomical structural information for continuous detection and different individual comparison, but the body deformation happened during different data acquisition needs sophisticated registration. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method for registering micro-CT mice images, which combines the strengths of point-based and intensity-based registration methods. Point-based non-rigid method using thin-plate spline robust point matching algorithm is utilized to acquire a coarse registration. And then intensity-based non-rigid method using normalized mutual information, Halton sampling and adaptive stochastic gradient descent optimization is used to acquire precise registration. Two accuracy metrics, Dice coefficient and average surface distance are used to do the quantitative evaluation. With the intra- and intersubject micro-CT mice images registration assessment, the hybrid method has been proven capable of excellent performance on micro-CT mice images registration.