Abstract #1385

Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration of 4th-Order Diffusion Tensor Fields and Atlas Construction

Angelos Barmpoutis¹, Baba C. Vemuri¹, Dena Howland², John R. Forder³

¹CISE, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; ²Neuroscience, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; ³Radiology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

In this work we present a method for simultaneous groupwise non-rigid registration of 4th-order tensor fields and atlas construction. To achieve the task of registration, we first define a novel distance measure on 4th order tensors using the Riemannian metric of positive real numbers. This metric is employed in an unbiased cost function, that is being minimized in order to estimate the unknown deformation fields and at the same time construct the unknown 4th-order tensor field atlas. We demonstrate the method using DW-MRI datasets from three rat spinal cords.