Registration of ultra-high resolution 3D PLI data of human brain sections to their corresponding high-resolution counterpart

The structural analysis of nerve fibers of the human brain is an important topic in current neuroscience. To obtain information about neural connections with micrometer resolution, polarized light imaging (3D PLI) of histological brain sections is well suited. In our application, both high-resolution (HR, 64µm in-plane pixel size) and ultra-high resolution (ultra-HR, 1.3µm) 3D PLI data of human brain sections are acquired. However, due to arbitrary translations and rotations caused by the sectioning and mounting process, spatial coherence between sections is lost and image registration is necessary. We introduce a new feature-based approach for registration of ultra-HR 3D PLI data to their corresponding HR images. The approach is based on a novel multi-scale salient feature detection method that is well suited for 3D PLI data. We have successfully evaluated the approach and applied it to 83 sections of a human brain. An experimental comparison with previous state-of-the-art feature detectors demonstrates the superior performance of our approach.