niftyreg.nonlinear: Two and three dimensional nonlinear image registration

Description

The niftyreg.nonlinear function performs nonlinear registration for two and three dimensional images. 4D images may also be registered volumewise to a 3D image, or 3D images slicewise to a 2D image. The warping is based on free-form deformations, parameterised using an image of control points.

Usage

niftyreg.nonlinear(source, target, init = NULL, sourceMask = NULL,
  targetMask = NULL, symmetric = TRUE, nLevels = 3L,
  maxIterations = 150L, nBins = 64L, bendingEnergyWeight = 0.001,
  linearEnergyWeight = 0.01, jacobianWeight = 0, finalSpacing = c(5, 5,
  5), spacingUnit = c("voxel", "world"), interpolation = 3L,
  verbose = FALSE, estimateOnly = FALSE, sequentialInit = FALSE)

Arguments

source

The source image, an object of class "nifti" or "internalImage", or a plain array, or a NIfTI-1 filename. Must have 2, 3 or 4 dimensions.

target

The target image, an object of class "nifti" or "internalImage", or a plain array, or a NIfTI-1 filename. Must have 2 or 3 dimensions.

init

Transformation(s) to be used for initialisation, which may be NULL, for no initialisation, or an affine matrix or control point image (nonlinear only). For multiple registration, where the source image has one more dimension than the target,

sourceMask

An optional mask image in source space, whose nonzero region will be taken as the region of interest for the registration. Ignored when symmetric is FALSE.

targetMask

An optional mask image in target space, whose nonzero region will be taken as the region of interest for the registration.

symmetric

Logical value. Should forward and reverse transformations be estimated simultaneously?

nLevels

A single integer specifying the number of levels of the algorithm that should be applied. If zero, no optimisation will be performed, and the final control-point image will be the same as its initialisation value.

maxIterations

A single integer specifying the maximum number of iterations to be used within each level. Fewer iterations may be used if a convergence test deems the process to have completed.

nBins

A single integer giving the number of bins to use for the joint histogram created by the algorithm.

bendingEnergyWeight

A numeric value giving the weight of the bending energy term in the cost function.

linearEnergyWeight

A numeric value giving the weight of the linear energy term in the cost function.

jacobianWeight

A numeric value giving the weight of the Jacobian determinant term in the cost function.

finalSpacing

A numeric vector giving the spacing of control points in the final grid, along the X, Y and Z directions respectively. This is set from the initial control point image, if one is supplied.

spacingUnit

A character string giving the units in which the finalSpacing is specified: either "voxel" for pixels/voxels, or "world" for real-world units (see pixunits).

interpolation

A single integer specifying the type of interpolation to be applied to the final resampled image. May be 0 (nearest neighbour), 1 (trilinear) or 3 (cubic spline). No other values are valid.

verbose

A single logical value: if TRUE, the code will give some feedback on its progress; otherwise, nothing will be output while the algorithm runs. Run time can be seconds or more, depending on the size and dimensionality of the images.

estimateOnly

Logical value: if TRUE, transformations will be estimated, but images will not be resampled.

sequentialInit

If TRUE and source has higher dimensionality than target, transformations which are not explicitly initialised will begin from the result of the previous registration.

Value

See niftyreg.

Details

This function performs the dual operations of finding a transformation to optimise image alignment, and resampling the source image into the space of the target image (and vice-versa, if symmetric is TRUE). Unlike niftyreg.linear, this transformation is nonlinear, and the degree of deformation may vary across the image.

The nonlinear warping is based on free-form deformations. A lattice of equally-spaced control points is defined over the target image, each of which can be moved to locally modify the mapping to the source image. In order to assess the quality of the warping between the two images, an objective function based on the normalised mutual information is used, with penalty terms based on the bending energy or the squared log of the Jacobian determinant. The objective function value is optimised using a conjugate gradient scheme.

The source image may have 2, 3 or 4 dimensions, and the target 2 or 3. The dimensionality of the target image determines whether 2D or 3D registration is applied, and source images with one more dimension than the target (i.e. 4D to 3D, or 3D to 2D) will be registered volumewise or slicewise, as appropriate. In the latter case the last dimension of the resulting image is taken from the source image, while all other dimensions come from the target. One image of control points is returned for each registration performed.

References

The algorithm used by this function is described in the following publication.

M. Modat, G.R. Ridgway, Z.A. Taylor, M. Lehmann, J. Barnes, D.J. Hawkes, N.C. Fox & S. Ourselin (2010). Fast free-form deformation using graphics processing units. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 98(3):278-284.