Unwarping confocal microscopy images of bee brains by nonrigid registration to a magnetic resonance microscopy image

• Published in: Journal of Biomedical Optics 2005-03, Vol.10 (2), p.024018-024018
• Main Authors: Rohlfing, Torsten, Schaupp, Frank, Haddad, Daniel, Brandt, Robert, Haase, Axel, Menzel, Randolf, Maurer, Calvin R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Bees; Brain - anatomy & histology; confocal microscopy imaging; geometrical distortion; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; magnetic resonance microscopy; Microscopy, Confocal; nonrigid image registration
• ISSN: 1083-3668; 1560-2281
• DOI: 10.1117/1.1896025

Confocal microscopy (CM) is a powerful image acquisition technique that is well established in many biological applications. It provides 3-D acquisition with high spatial resolution and can acquire several different channels of complementary image information. Due to the specimen extraction and preparation process, however, the shapes of imaged objects may differ considerably from their appearance. Magnetic resonance microscopy (MRM) is an evolving variant of magnetic resonance imaging, which achieves microscopic resolutions using a high magnetic field and strong magnetic gradients. Compared to CM imaging, MRM allows for imaging and is virtually free of geometrical distortions. We propose to combine the advantages of both methods by unwarping CM images using a MRM reference image. Our method incorporates a sequence of image processing operators applied to the MRM image, followed by a two-stage intensity-based registration to compute a nonrigid coordinate transformation between the CM images and the MRM image. We present results obtained using CM images from the brains of 20 honey bees and a MRM image of an bee brain. ©