A Unified Feature Registration Method for Brain Mapping

This paper describes the design, implementation and preliminary results of a unified non-rigid feature registration method for the purpose of brain anatomical structure alignment. We combine different types of features together and fuse them into a common point representation. This enables the co-registration of all features using a new non-rigid point matching algorithm. In this way, the spatial interrelationships between different features are directly utilized to improve the registration accuracy. We also conducted a carefully designed synthetic study to compare some anatomical features’ ability for non-rigid brain structure alignment. This study allows us to evaluate the relative improvements in registration accuracy when different features are combined.