Validation of a nonrigid registration error detection algorithm using clinical MRI brain data.

Identification of error in nonrigid registration is a critical problem in the medical image processing community. We recently proposed an algorithm that we call "Assessing Quality Using Image Registration Circuits" (AQUIRC) to identify nonrigid registration errors and have tested its performance using simulated cases. In this paper, we extend our previous work to assess AQUIRC's ability to detect local nonrigid registration errors and validate it quantitatively at specific clinical landmarks, namely the anterior commissure and the posterior commissure. To test our approach on a representative range of error we utilize five different registration methods and use 100 target images and nine atlas images. Our results show that AQUIRC's measure of registration quality correlates with the true target registration error (TRE) at these selected landmarks with an R(2)=0.542. To compare our method to a more conventional approach, we compute local normalized correlation coefficient (LNCC) and show that AQUIRC performs similarly. However, a multi-linear regression performed with both AQUIRC's measure and LNCC shows a higher correlation with TRE than correlations obtained with either measure alone, thus showing the complementarity of these quality measures. We conclude the paper by showing that the AQUIRC algorithm can be used to reduce registration errors for all five algorithms.