Multicontrast MRI registration of carotid arteries in atherosclerotic and normal subjects

Clinical studies on atherosclerosis agree that multi-contrast MRI is the most promising technique for in-vivo characterization of carotid plaques. Multi-contrast image registration is essential for this application, because it corrects misalignments caused by patient motion during MRI acquisition. To date, it has not been determined which automatic method provides the best registration accuracy in carotid MRI. This study tries to answer this question by presenting an iterative coarse-to-fine algorithm that co-registers multi-contrast images of carotid arteries using three similarity metrics: Correlation Ratio (CR), Mutual Information (MI) and Gradient MI (GMI). The registration algorithm is first applied on the entire images and then only on the Region of Interest (ROI) of the carotid arteries using sub-pixel accuracy. The ROI is defined by an automatic carotid detection algorithm, which was tested on a group of 20 patients with different types of atherosclerotic plaques (sensitivity 91% and specificity 88%). Automatic registration was compared with image alignment obtained by manual operators (clinically qualified vascular specialists). Registration accuracies were measured using a novel MRI validation procedure, in which the gold standard is represented by in-plane rigid transformations applied by the MRI system to mimic neck movements. Overall, automatic methods (GMI = 181 ± 104 μm) produced lower registration errors than manual operators (365 ± 102 μm). GMI performed slightly better than CR and MI, suggesting that anatomical information improves registration accuracy in the carotid ROI. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.