Optimal atlas construction through hierarchical image registration
George J. Grevera, Jayaram K. Udupa, Dewey Odhner, Drew A. Torigian · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2016
Atlases (digital or otherwise) are common in medicine. However, there is no standard framework for creating them from medical images. One traditional approach is to pick a representative subject and then proceed to label structures/regions of interest in this image. Another is to create a "mean" or average subject. Atlases may also contain more than a single representative (e.g., the Visible Human contains both a male and a female data set). Other criteria besides gender may be used as well, and the atlas may contain many examples for a given criterion. In this work, we propose that atlases be created in an optimal manner using a well-established graph theoretic approach using a min spanning tree (or more generally, a collection of them). The resulting atlases may contain many examples for a given criterion. In fact, our framework allows for the addition of new subjects to the atlas to allow it to evolve over time. Furthermore, one can apply segmentation methods to the graph (e.g., graph-cut, fuzzy connectedness, or cluster analysis) which allow it to be separated into "sub-atlases" as it evolves. We demonstrate our method by applying it to 50 3D CT data sets of the chest region, and by comparing it to a number of traditional methods using measures such as Mean Squared Difference, Mattes Mutual Information, and Correlation, and for rigid registration. Our results demonstrate that optimal atlases can be constructed in this manner and outperform other methods of construction using freely available software.