Multi-temporal MRI carpal bone volumes analysis by principal axes registration

Abstract

In this paper, a principal axes registration technique is presented, with the relevant application to segmented volumes. The purpose of the proposed registration is to compare multi-temporal volumes of carpal bones from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) acquisitions. Starting from the study of the second-order moment matrix, the eigenvectors are calculated to allow the rotation of volumes with respect to reference axes. Then the volumes are spatially translated to become perfectly overlapped. A quantitative evaluation of the results obtained is carried out by computing classical indices from the confusion matrix, which depict similarity measures between the volumes of the same organ as extracted from MRI acquisitions executed at different moments. Within the medical field, the way a registration can be used to compare multi-temporal images is of great interest, since it provides the physician with a tool which allows a visual monitoring of a disease evolution. The segmentation method used herein is based on the graph theory and is a robust, unsupervised and parameters independent method. Patients affected by rheumatic diseases have been considered