Towards Ultra-High Resolution 3D Reconstruction of a Whole Rat Brain from 3D-PLI Data

3D reconstruction of the fiber connectivity of the rat brain at microscopic scale enables gaining detailed insight about the complex structural organization of the brain. We introduce a new method for registration and 3D reconstruction of high- and ultra-high resolution ( 64 \(\upmu \)m and 1.3 \(\upmu \)m pixel size) histological images of a Wistar rat brain acquired by 3D polarized light imaging (3D-PLI). Our method exploits multi-scale and multi-modal 3D-PLI data up to cellular resolution. We propose a new feature transform-based similarity measure and a weighted regularization scheme for accurate and robust non-rigid registration. To transform the 1.3 \(\upmu \)m ultra-high resolution data to the reference blockface images a feature-based registration method followed by a non-rigid registration is proposed. Our approach has been successfully applied to 278 histological sections of a rat brain and the performance has been quantitatively evaluated using manually placed landmarks by an expert.