A non-rigid registration method for mouse whole body skeleton registration

Abstract

Micro-CT/PET imaging scanner provides a powerful tool to study tumor in small rodents in response to therapy. Accurate image registration is a necessary step to quantify the characteristics of images acquired in longitudinal studies. Small animal registration is challenging because of the very deformable body of the animal often resulting in different postures despite physical restraints. In this paper, we propose a non-rigid registration approach for the automatic registration of mouse whole body skeletons, which is based on our improved 3D shape context non-rigid registration method. The whole body skeleton registration approach has been tested on 21 pairs of mouse CT images with variations of individuals and time-instances. The experimental results demonstrated the stability and accuracy of the proposed method for automatic mouse whole body skeleton registration. © 2012, SPIE.