Tuning of a deformable image registration procedure for skin component mechanical properties assessment.

Several studies report the mechanical properties of skin tissues but their values largely depend on the measurement method. Therefore, we investigated the feasibility of recognizing the cellular constituents mechanical properties of pigmented skin by Confocal Laser Scanner Microscopy (CLSM). With this purpose, an healthy volunteer was examined in three areas nearby a pigmented skin lesion in two configurations: deforming and non deforming the nevus. The tissue displacement of the nevus was then assessed by means of deformable registration of the images in these two configurations. There are several registration strategy able to overcome this task, among them, we proposed two methods with different deformation models: a Free Form Deformation (FFD) model based on b-spline and a second one based on Demons Registration Algorithm (DRA). These two strategies need the definition of several parameters in order to obtain optimal registration performances. Thus, we tuned these parameters by means of simulated data and evaluated their registration abilities on the real in vivo CLSM acquisitions in the two configurations. The results showed that the registration using DRA had a better performance in comparison to the FFD one, in particular in two out of the three areas the DRA performance was significantly better than the FFD one. The registration procedure highlighted deformation differences among the chosen areas.