Non-rigid registration of small animal skeletons from micro-CT using 3D shape context

Small animal registration is an important step for molecular image analysis. Skeleton registration from whole-body or only partial micro Computerized Tomography (CT) image is often performed to match individual rats to atlases and templates, for example to identify organs in positron emission tomography (PET). In this paper, we extend the shape context matching technique for 3D surface registration and apply it for rat hind limb skeleton registration from CT images. Using the proposed method, after standard affine iterative closest point (ICP) registration, correspondences between the 3D points from sour and target objects were robustly found and used to deform the limb skeleton surface with thin-plate-spline (TPS). Experiments are described using phantoms and actual rat hind limb skeletons. On animals, mean square errors were decreased by the proposed registration compared to that of its initial alignment. Visually, skeletons were successfully registered even in cases of very different animal poses.