Framework for multi-feature registration of medical images

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Millions of dollars of government and industrial support have been used to collect medical image data from the living brains of tens of thousands of subjects with the goal to advance our understanding of the human brain in health and in disease. Recent advances in computational technology and computer science made it possible to analyze such enormous quantities of data. Examples brain analysis can include the study of longitudinal growth trajectories in normal development or in abnormal development; the study of ageing to help understand disease progression; and the identification of imaging biomarkers for diagnostic purposes. Most analyses of brain data relies on a registration step where all brain are aligned into a standard coordinate system, so that an x,y,z coordinate addresses the same anatomical location in all brains. However, analysis of the terabytes of data representing thousands of subjects can be time consuming even when implemented on a supercomputer or cluster. This constraint limits the interactive analysis of such data. New tools are needed to align these datasets so that useful information can be extracted from the terabytes of data collected.