A comparison of automated and manual co-registration for magnetoencephalography

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 15; no. 4; p. e0232100
• Main Authors: Houck, Jon M, Claus, Eric D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 29.04.2020; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Algorithms; Automation; Biology and Life Sciences; Brain - anatomy & histology; Comparative analysis; Diagnostic imaging; Digitization; Female; Head - anatomy & histology; Headspace; Humans; Image processing; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - standards; Localization; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - standards; Magnetoencephalography; Magnetoencephalography - methods; Magnetoencephalography - standards; Male; Medical imaging; Medicine and Health Sciences; Methods; Neuroimaging; Neurons; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Physical Sciences; Quality; Registration; Reliability analysis; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences; United States; New Mexico; United States > US
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232100

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a neuroimaging technique that accurately captures the rapid (sub-millisecond) activity of neuronal populations. Interpretation of functional data from MEG relies upon registration to the participant's anatomical MRI. The key remaining step is to transform the participant's MRI into the MEG head coordinate space. Although both automated and manual approaches to co-registration are available, the relative accuracy of two approaches has not been systematically evaluated. The goal of the present study was to compare the accuracy of manual and automated co-registration. Resting MEG and T1-weighted MRI data were collected from 90 participants. Automated and manual co-registration were performed on the same subjects, and the inter-method reliability of the two methods assessed using the intra-class correlation. Median co-registration error for both methods was within acceptable limits. Inter-method reliability was in the "good" range for co-registration error, and the "good" to "excellent" range for translation and rotation. These results suggest that the output of the automated co-registration procedure is comparable to that achieved using manual co-registration.