Fast deformable matching of 3D images over multiscale nested subspaces. Application to atlas-based MRI segmentation

This paper presents a fast method to perform dense deformable matching of 3D images, applied to the registration of inter-subject brain MR images. To recover the complex morphological variations in neuroanatomy, the registration method uses a hierarchy of 3D deformations fields that are estimated, by minimizing a global energy function over a sequence of nested subspaces. The resulting deformable matching method shows low sensitivity to local minima and is able to track large non-linear deformations, with moderate computational load. The performances of the approach are assessed both on simulated 3D transformations and on a real data base of 3D brain MR images from different individuals. An application of the deformable image matching method to 3D atlas-based image segmentation is presented. This atlas-based segmentation is used at Strasbourg Hospital, in daily clinical applications, in order to extract regions of interest from 3D MR images of patients suffering from epilepsy. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.