Orientation matching for diffusion tensor image registration

This thesis develops a registration algorithm specifically for diffusion-tensor (DT) im­ ages. The proposed approach matches the tensor orientations to find the registration transformation. Early results show that local optimisation does not find the global minimum in registration of DT-MR brain images. Therefore, a global optimisation re­ gistration technique is also implemented. This thesis proposes several new similarity measures for DT registration and provides a comparison of them along with several others previously proposed in the literature. The thesis also proposes several new per­ formance evaluation measures to assess registration quality and develops a performance evaluation framework that uses directional coherence and landmark separation. Experiments with direct optimisation demonstrate increased local minima in tensor registration objective functions over scalar registration. Using registration with global optimisation, this thesis compares the performance of scalar-derived similarity measures with those derived from the full tensor. Results suggest that similarity meas­ ures derived from the full tensor matrix do not find a more accurate registration than those based on the derived scalar indices. Affine and higher-order polynomial regis­ tration is not reliable enough to make a firm conclusion about whether diffusion tensor orientation matching improves the accuracy of registration over registration algorithms that ignore orientation. The main problem preventing a firm conclusion is that the local minima problem persists despite the use of global optimisation, causing poor registra­ tion of the regions of interest.