Atlas-based whole-body segmentation of mice from low-contrast Micro-CT data

Abstract 

This paper presents a fully automated method for atlas-based whole-body segmentation in non-contrast-enhanced Micro-CT data of mice. The position and posture of mice in such studies may vary to a large extent, complicating data comparison in cross-sectional and follow-up studies. Moreover, Micro-CT typically yields only poor soft-tissue contrast for abdominal organs.

To overcome these challenges, we propose a method that divides the problem into an atlas constrained registration based on high-contrast organs in Micro-CT (skeleton, lungs and skin), and a soft tissue approximation step for low-contrast organs. We first present a modification of the MOBY mouse atlas (Segars et al., 2004) by partitioning the skeleton into individual bones, by adding anatomically realistic joint types and by defining a hierarchical atlas tree description. The individual bones as well as the lungs of this adapted MOBY atlas are then registered one by one traversing the model tree hierarchy. To this end, we employ the Iterative Closest Point method and constrain the Degrees of Freedom of the local registration, dependent on the joint type and motion range. This atlas-based strategy renders the method highly robust to exceptionally large postural differences among scans and to moderate pathological bone deformations. The skin of the torso is registered by employing a novel method for matching distributions of geodesic distances locally, constrained by the registered skeleton. Because of the absence of image contrast between abdominal organs, they are interpolated from the atlas to the subject domain using Thin-Plate-Spline approximation, defined by correspondences on the already established registration of high-contrast structures (bones, lungs and skin).

We extensively evaluate the proposed registration method, using 26 non-contrast-enhanced Micro-CT datasets of mice, and the skin registration and organ interpolation, using contrast-enhanced Micro-CT datasets of 15 mice. The posture and shape varied significantly among the animals and the data was acquired in vivo. After registration, the mean Euclidean distance was less than two voxel dimensions for the skeleton and the lungs respectively and less than one voxel dimension for the skin. Dice coefficients of volume overlap between manually segmented and interpolated skeleton and organs vary between 0.47±0.08 for the kidneys and 0.73±0.04 for the brain. These experiments demonstrate the method’s effectiveness for overcoming exceptionally large variations in posture, yielding acceptable approximation accuracy even in the absence of soft-tissue contrast in in vivo Micro-CT data without requiring user initialization.

Keywords: In vivo small animal imaging, Atlas-based whole-body segmentation, Articulated registration, Micro-CT