Impact of RF inhomogeneity correction on image registration of micro MRI rodent brain images

High field strength small animal magnetic resonance imaging (microMRI) allows to visualize the internal anatomy of the animal, especially of the brain, with high resolution. Longitudinal in vivo small animal molecular imaging applications greatly benefit from advanced image processing methods for removing image artifacts like inhomogeneity, to spatially normalize images and to obtain atlas based segmentation. Subtle interactions between different methods, which might otherwise remain undiscovered if the individual methods are validated with phantom or simulated data, are better evaluated using real-world data. In this paper, we quantitatively demonstrate the confounding effect of RF inhomogeneity on image registration of in vivo microMRI images of rodent brain and validate the benefit of bias field correction on both registration accuracy and registration robustness.