Brain atlas fusion from high-thickness diagnostic magnetic resonance images by learning-based super-resolution

• Published in: Pattern recognition Vol. 63; pp. 531 - 541
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jinpeng, Zhang, Lichi, Xiang, Lei, Shao, Yeqin, Wu, Guorong, Zhou, Xiaodong, Shen, Dinggang, Wang, Qian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Brain atlas; Groupwise registration; Image enhancement; Random forest regression; Sparsity learning; Super-resolution; Brain atlas; Sparsity learning; Super-resolution; Image enhancement; Random forest regression; Groupwise registration; image enhancement; sparsity learning; random forest regression; super-resolution; groupwise registration
• ISSN: 0031-3203; 1873-5142
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2016.09.019

It is fundamentally important to fuse the brain atlas from magnetic resonance (MR) images for many imaging-based studies. Most existing works focus on fusing the atlases from high-quality MR images. However, for low-quality diagnostic images (i.e., with high inter-slice thickness), the problem of atlas fusion has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we intend to fuse the brain atlas from the high-thickness diagnostic MR images that are prevalent for clinical routines. The main idea of our works is to extend the conventional groupwise registration by incorporating a novel super-resolution strategy. The contribution of the proposed super-resolution framework is two-fold. First, each high-thickness subject image is reconstructed to be isotropic by the patch-based sparsity learning. Then, the reconstructed isotropic image is enhanced for better quality through the random-forest-based regression model. In this way, the images obtained by the super-resolution strategy can be fused together by applying the groupwise registration method to construct the required atlas. Our experiments have shown that the proposed framework can effectively solve the problem of atlas fusion from the low-quality brain MR images. •We fuse the brain atlas from real diagnostic MR images with high inter-slice thickness.•All images are processed through the two-stage learning-based super-resolution.•Groupwise registration is applied for unbiased atlas fusion.