Abstract #3729

3D Co-Registration of MRI and Histology in a Mouse Model of Obesity and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Eli Gibson¹,², Lanette J. Friesen-Waldner,²³, Amanda M. Hamilton², Emeline J. Ribot², Trevor P. Wade³,⁴, Curtis N. Wiens⁵, Kundan Thind,²³, Jacqueline K. Harris³, Nica M. Borradaile⁶, Charles A. McKenzie¹,³, Aaron D. Ward¹,²

¹Biomedical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; ²Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario, Canada; ³Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; ⁴Robarts Research Institute , London, Ontario, Canada; ⁵Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; ⁶Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

Validation of quantitative MRI for non-invasive quantification of liver fat ideally uses accurate registration to an accepted reference standard (e.g. histology). We demonstrate accurate co-registration of murine in vivo 3D whole-body water-only and fat-only images to stained histological liver images. Three 129/SVJ mice were fed a high fat diet to induce hepatic steatosis and obesity, imaged using 3D quantitative IDEAL MRI at 3T, then sectioned on a cryomicrotome, where 3D optical and histology images were collected. We successfully co-registered MR-optical images and optical-histology images interactively using thin-plate-spline transformations with mean target registration errors of 0.7 mm and 0.1 mm, respectively.