Very high-resolution morphometry using mass-preserving deformations and HAMMER elastic registration

This article presents a very high-resolution voxel-based morphometric method, by using a mass-preserving deformation mechanism and a fully automated spatial normalization approach, referred to as HAM-MER. By using a hierarchical attribute-based deformation strategy, HAMMER partly overcomes limitations of several existing spatial normalization methods, and it achieves a level of accuracy that makes possible morphometric measurements of spatial specificity close to the voxel dimensions. The proposed method is validated by a series of experiments, with both simulated and real brain images. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).