The influence of intensity standardization on medical image registration

Ulas Bagci; Jayaram K. Udupa; Li Bai

doi:10.1117/12.843969

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23 February 2010 The influence of intensity standardization on medical image registration

Ulas Bagci, Jayaram K. Udupa, Li Bai

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Proceedings Volume 7625, Medical Imaging 2010: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Modeling; 76251X (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.843969
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Acquisition-to-acquisition signal intensity variations (non-standardness) are inherent in MR images. Standardization is a post processing method for correcting inter-subject intensity variations through transforming all images from the given image gray scale into a standard gray scale wherein similar intensities achieve similar tissue meanings. The lack of a standard image intensity scale in MRI leads to many difficulties in tissue characterizability, image display, and analysis, including image segmentation. This phenomenon has been documented well; however, effects of standardization on medical image registration have not been studied yet. In this paper, we investigate the influence of intensity standardization in registration tasks with systematic and analytic evaluations involving clinical MR images. We conducted nearly 20,000 clinical MR image registration experiments and evaluated the quality of registrations both quantitatively and qualitatively. The evaluations show that intensity variations between images degrades the accuracy of registration performance. The results imply that the accuracy of image registration not only depends on spatial and geometric similarity but also on the similarity of the intensity values for the same tissues in different images.

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Ulas Bagci, Jayaram K. Udupa, and Li Bai "The influence of intensity standardization on medical image registration", Proc. SPIE 7625, Medical Imaging 2010: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Modeling, 76251X (23 February 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.843969

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