Inter-subject MR-PET image registration and integration

A MR-PET inter-subject image integration technique is developed to provide more precise anatomical location based on a template MR image, and to examine the anatomical variation in sensory-motor stimulation or to obtain cross-subject signal averaging to enhance the delectability of focal brain activity detected by different subject PET images. In this study, a multimodality intra-subject image registration procedure is firstly applied to align MR and PET images of the same subject. The second procedure is to estimate an elastic image transformation that can nonlinearly deform each 3D brain MR image and map them to the template MR image. The estimation procedure of the elastic image transformation is based on a strategy that searches the best local image match to achieve an optimal global image match, iteratively. The final elastic image transformation estimated for each subject will then be used to deform the MR-PET registered PET image. After the nonlinear PET image deformation, MR-PET inter-subject mapping, averaging, and fusing are simultaneously accomplished. The developed technique has been implemented to an UNIX based workstation with Motif window system. The software named Elastic-IRIS has few requirements of user interaction. The registered anatomical location of 10 different subjects has a standard deviation of /spl sim/2 mm in the x, y, and z directions. The processing time for one MR-PET inter-subject registration ranged from 20 to 30 minutes on a SUN SPARC-20.