Mouse whole-body organ mapping by non-rigid registration approach

Abstract

Automatic small animal whole-body organ registration is challenging because of subject's joint structure, posture and position difference and loss of reference features. In this paper, an improved 3D shape context based non-rigid registration method is applied for mouse whole-body skeleton registration and lung registration. A geodesic path based non-rigid registration method is proposed for mouse torso skin registration. Based on the above registration methods, a novel non-rigid registration framework is proposed for mouse whole-body organ mapping from an atlas to new scanned CT data. A preliminary experiment was performed to test the method on lung and skin registration. A whole-body organ mapping was performed on three target data and the selected organs were compared with the manual outlining results. The robust of the method has been demonstrated.