No abstract

In this paper we propose a new method of elastic registration of anatomical structures that bears an inner skeleton, such as the knee, hand or spine. Such a method has to deal with great degrees of variability, specially for the case of inter-subject registration; but even for the intra-subject case the degree of variability of images will be large since the structures we bear in mind are articulated. Rigid registration methods are clearly inappropriate for this problem, and well-known elastic methods do not usually incorporate the restriction of maintaining long skeletal structures straight. A new method is therefore needed to deal with such a situation; we call this new method "articulated registration".The inner bone skeleton is modeled with a wire model, where wires are drawn by connecting landmarks located in the main joints of the skeletal structure to be registered (long bones). The main feature of our registration method is that within the bone axis (specifically, where the wires are) an exact registration is guaranteed, while for the remaining image points an elastic registration is carried out based on a distance transform (with respect to the model wires); this causes the registration on long bones to be affine to all practical purposes, while the registration of soft tissue -far from the bones-is elastic.As a proof-of-concept of this method we describe the registration of hands on radiographs.

No abstract

Abstract. In this paper we generalize the Log-Euclidean polyaffine registration framework of Arsigny et al.[1] to deal with articulated structures. This framework has very useful properties as it guarantees the invertibility of smooth geometric transformations. In articulated registration a skeleton model is defined for rigid structures such as bones. The final transformation is affine for the bones and elastic for other tissues in the image. We extend the Arsigny el al.'s method to deal with locally-affine registration of pairs of wires. This enables the possibility of using this registration framework to deal with articulated structures. In this context, the design of the weighting functions, which merge the affine transformations defined for each pair of wires, has a great impact not only on the final result of the registration algorithm, but also on the invertibility of the global elastic transformation. Several experiments, using both synthetic images and hand radiographs, are also presented.

Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is the gold standard method for measuring periprosthetic bone remodeling, but relies on a region of interest (ROI) analysis approach. While this addresses issues of anatomic variability, it is insensitive to bone remodeling events at the sub-ROI level. We have validated a high-spatial resolution tool, termed DXA-region free analysis (DXA-RFA) that uses advanced image processing approaches to allow quantitation of bone mineral density (BMD) at the individual pixel (datapoint) level. Here we compared the resolution of bone remodeling measurements made around a stemless femoral prosthesis in 18 subjects over 24 months using ROI-based analysis versus that made using DXA-RFA. Using the ROI approach the regional pattern of BMD change varied by region, with greatest loss in ROI5 (20%, p < 0.001), and largest gain in ROI4 (6%, p < 0.05). Analysis using DXA-RFA showed a focal zone of increased BMD localized to the prosthesis-bone interface (30-40%, p < 0.001) that was not resolved using conventional DXA analysis. The 20% bone loss observed in ROI5 with conventional DXA was resolved to a focal area adjacent to the cut surface of the infero-medial femoral neck (up to 40%, p < 0.0001). DXA-RFA enables high resolution analysis of DXA datasets without the limitations incurred using ROI-based approaches. ß