Registration of cortical anatomical structures via robust 3D point matching

Inter-subject non-rigid registration of cortical anatomical structures as seen in MR is a challenging problem. The variability of the sulcal and gyral patterns across patients makes the task of registration especially difficult regardless of whether voxel- or feature-based techniques are used. In this paper, we present an approach to matching sulcal point features interactively extracted by neuroanatomical experts. The robust point matching (RPM) algorithm is used to find the optimal affine transformations for matching sulcal points. A 3D linearly interpolated non-rigid warping is then generated for the original image volume. We present quantitative and visual comparisons between Talairach, mutual information-based volumetric matching and RPM on five subjects' MR images.