Interpolation of Histological Slices by Means of Non-rigid Registration

It is a common approach to create and inspect histological slices to investigate functional and morphological structures on a cellular level. For the easier analysis of the resulting data sets, the underlying 3-D structure has to be reconstructed and visualized. Due to mechanical stress imposed on the tissue during the slicing, some slices are damaged, leading to an unsatisfying reconstruction result. In this article we present a means to interpolate missing images. For this, a deformation field, calculated by a variational non-rigid registration method using adjacent slices as reference and template images, is partially applied to the template image. The approach is tested on a histological data set, and evaluated using visual inspection by experts. The resulting reconstruction is shown to be a significant improvement.