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- Title
Multi-Steps Registration Protocol for Multimodal MR Images of Hip Skeletal Muscles in a Longitudinal Study.
- Authors
Fontana, Lucia; Mastropietro, Alfonso; Scalco, Elisa; Peruzzo, Denis; Beretta, Elena; Strazzer, Sandra; Arrigoni, Filippo; Rizzo, Giovanna
- Abstract
Image registration is crucial in multimodal longitudinal skeletal muscle Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies to extract reliable parameters that can be used as indicators for physio/pathological characterization of muscle tissue and for assessing the effectiveness of treatments. This paper aims at proposing a reliable registration protocol and evaluating its accuracy in a longitudinal study. The hips of 6 subjects were scanned, in a multimodal protocol, at 2 different time points by a 3 Tesla scanner; the proposed multi-step registration pipeline is based on rigid and elastic transformations implemented in SimpleITK using a multi-resolution technique. The effects of different image pre-processing (muscle masks, isotropic voxels) and different parameters' values (learning rates and mesh sizes) were quantitatively assessed using standard accuracy indexes. Rigid registration alone does not provide satisfactory accuracy for inter-sessions alignment and a further elastic step is needed. The use of isotropic voxels, combined with the muscle masking, provides the best result in terms of accuracy. Learning rates can be increased to speed up the process without affecting the final results. The protocol described in this paper, complemented by open-source software, can be a useful guide for researchers that approach for the first time the issues related to the muscle MR image registration.
- Subjects
MAGNETIC resonance imaging; RECORDING &; registration; IMAGE registration; OPTICAL scanners; MULTIMODAL user interfaces; LONGITUDINAL method; SCANNING systems
- Publication
Applied Sciences (2076-3417), 2020, Vol 10, Issue 21, p7823
- ISSN
2076-3417
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/app10217823