Automatic Nonlinear Transformation to Talairach Stereotaxic Space with Quality Assurance

Mingyi Li¹, Blessy Mathew¹, Katherine Koenig¹, Jian Lin¹, Michael Phillips¹, Mark J. Lowe¹

Transforming MRI brain images into Talairach space will greatly facilitate the comparison of neuroimaging research results across subjects and applications of atlas to research subjects and clinical patients. We developed an automatic processing pipeline based on nonlinear registration to transform brain images to Talairach space. The pipeline depended on matching scores derived from brain parcellation for quality assurance. The pipeline was tested on subjects including five controls and eleven patients with high EDSS score. The results showed the new method had significant improvement on the matching accuracy for both control and patients over two widely used methods.