Anatomical landmark based registration of contrast enhanced T1-weighted MR images

In many problems involving multiple image analysis, an im- age registration step is required. One such problem appears in brain tumor imaging, where baseline and follow-up image volumes from a tu- mor patient are often to-be compared. Nature of the registration for a change detection problem in brain tumor growth analysis is usually rigid or affine. Contrast enhanced T1-weighted MR images are widely used in clinical practice for monitoring brain tumors. Over this modality, con- tours of the active tumor cells and whole tumor borders and margins are visually enhanced. In this study, a new technique to register serial contrast enhanced T1 weighted MR images is presented. The proposed fully-automated method is based on five anatomical landmarks: eye balls, nose, confluence of sagittal sinus, and apex of superior sagittal sinus. Af- ter extraction of anatomical landmarks from fixed and moving volumes, an affine transformation is estimated by minimizing the sum of squared distances between the landmark coordinates. Final result is refined with a surface registration, which is based on head masks confined to the sur- face of the scalp, as well as to a plane constructed from three of the extracted features. The overall registration is not intensity based, and it depends only on the invariant structures. Validation studies using both synthetically transformed MRI data, and real MRI scans, which included several markers over the head of the patient were performed. In addition, comparison studies against manual landmarks marked by a radiologist, as well as against the results obtained from a typical mutual information based method were carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

Dimension Reduction by Mutual Information Discriminant Analysis

In the past few decades, researchers have proposed many discriminant analysis (DA) algorithms for the study of high-dimensional data in a variety of problems. Most DA algorithms for feature extraction are based on transformations that simultaneously maximize the between-class scatter and minimize the withinclass scatter matrices. This paper presents a novel DA algorithm for feature extraction using mutual information (MI). However, it is not always easy to obtain an accurate estimation for high-dimensional MI. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for feature extraction that is based on one-dimensional MI estimations. We will refer to this algorithm as mutual information discriminant analysis (MIDA). The performance of this proposed method was evaluated using UCI databases. The results indicate that MIDA provides robust performance over different data sets with different characteristics and that MIDA always performs better than, or at least comparable to, the best performing algorithms.Comment: 13pages, 3 tables, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Application