Statistical Properties of Jacobian Maps and the Realization of Unbiased Large-Deformation Nonlinear Image Registration
Source: Medical Imaging, IEEE
2007 Jun;26(6):822-832.
Author: Leow AD, Yanovsky I, Chiang MC, Lee AD, Klunder AD, Lu A, Becker JT, Davis SW, Toga AW, Thompson PM. PubMed ID: 17679333
Abstract:
Maps of local tissue compression or expansion are
often computed by comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
scans using nonlinear image registration. The resulting changes
are commonly analyzed using tensor-based morphometry to
make inferences about anatomical differences, often based on the
Jacobian map, which estimates local tissue gain or loss. Here, we
provide rigorous mathematical analyses of the Jacobian maps,
and use themto motivate a new numerical method to construct
unbiased nonlinear image registration. First, we argue that logarithmic
transformation is crucial for analyzing Jacobian values
representing morphometric differences. We then examine the
statistical distributions of log-Jacobian maps by defining the
Kullback–Leibler (KL) distance on material density functions
arising in continuum-mechanical models. With this framework,
unbiased image registration can be constructed by quantifying
the symmetric KL-distance between the identity map and the
resulting deformation. Implementation details, addressing the
proposed unbiased registration as well as the minimization of
symmetric image matching functionals, are then discussed and
shown to be applicable to other registration methods, such as
inverse consistent registration. In the results section, we test the
proposed framework, as well as present an illustrative application
mapping detailed 3-D brain changes in sequential magnetic
resonance imaging scans of a patient diagnosed with semantic
dementia. Using permutation tests, we show that the symmetrization
of image registration statistically reduces skewness in the
log-Jacobian map.