Registration of histology and magnetic resonance imaging of the brain

Abstract

Combining histology and non-invasive imaging has been attracting the attention of the medical imaging community for a long time, due to its potential to correlate macroscopic information with the underlying microscopic properties of tissues. Histology is an invasive procedure that disrupts the spatial arrangement of the tissue components but enables visualisation and characterisation at a cellular level. In contrast, macroscopic imaging allows non-invasive acquisition of volumetric information but does not provide any microscopic details. Through the establishment of spatial correspondences obtained via image registration, it is possible to compare micro- and macroscopic information and to recover the original histological arrangement in three dimensions. In this thesis, I present: (i) a survey of the literature relative to methods for histology reconstruction with and without the help of 3D medical imaging; (ii) a graph-theoretic method for histology volume reconstruction from sets of 2D sections, without external information; (iii) a method for multimodal 2D linear registration between histology and MRI based on partial matching of shape-informative boundaries

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