Partially Rigid 3D Registration of Flexible Tissues in High Resolution Anatomical MRI

Abstract

This contribution introduces a method for partially rigid 3D registration of high resolution magnetic resonance (MR) images of the eye globes (EG) and the optic nerve sheaths (ONS) based on the reconstruction of their 3D models. Conventional registration methods do not preserve anatomical structures in such a way that quantitative anatomical comparisons could be computed. Therefore, iterative closest points (ICP) registration method has been extended to enable partial rigid registration (PICP) of flexible tissue structures within certain spatially limited areas. The results of the proposed approach are compared with the non-linear registration method ART. It was shown that PICP approach considerably improved the matching quality of local tissue and preserved anatomical structure at the same time.