A statistical method for the evaluation of image registration for a series of images based on the assessment of consistency properties of the registration results is proposed. Consistency is defined as the residual error of the composition of cyclic registrations. By combining the transformations of different algorithms the consistency error allows a quantitative comparison without the use of ground truth, specifically, it allows a determination as to whether the algorithms are compatible and hence provide comparable registrations. Consistency testing is applied to evaluate retrospective correction of eddy current-induced image distortion in diffusion tensor imaging of the brain. In the literature several image transformations and similarity measures have been proposed, generally showing a significant reduction of distortion in side-by-side comparison of parametric maps before and after registration. Transformations derived from imaging physics and a three-dimensional affine transformation as well as mutual information (MI) and local correlation (LC) similarity are compared to each other by means of consistency testing. The dedicated transformations could not demonstrate a significant difference for more than half of the series considered. LC similarity is well-suited for distortion correction providing more consistent registrations which are comparable to MI.
The analysis of functional MR images of the brain such as FMRI and neuro perfusion is significantly limited by movement of the head during image acquisition. Already small motions introduce artifacts in voxel-based statistical analysis and restrict the assessment of functional information. The retrospective compensation of head motion is usually addressed by image registration techniques which spatially align the images of the time-series. In this paper we investigate the relevance of intermediate interpolation during the registration process, similarity measure and optimization scheme by means of statistical consistency of the registration results. Experiments show that cubic and quartic interpolation remarkably improve the consistency when compared to linear methods. The use of larger interpolation kernels, however, does not result in further improvements. Measures based on the mean squared error are successfully applied to FMRI time-series which provide constant tissue-to-image transfer. However, they are not suitable for neuro perfusion imaging since the change of image intensity during the inflow of the contrast agent affords measures typically applied in multi-modality registration. Our results indicate that a recently proposed measure based on local correlation is preferable to mutual information in the case of neuro perfusion.
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