Abstract
Spatial affine registration of brain images to a common template is usually performed as a preprocessing step in intersubject and intrasubject comparison studies, computer-aided diagnosis, region of interest selection and brain segmentation in tomography. Nevertheless, it is not straightforward to build a template of [123I]FP-CIT SPECT brain images because they exhibit very low intensity values outside the striatum. In this work, we present a procedure to automatically build a [123I]FP-CIT SPECT template in the standard Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space. The proposed methodology consists of a head voxel selection using the Otsu’s method, followed by a posterization of the source images to three different levels: background, head, and striatum. Analogously, we also design a posterized version of a brain image in the MNI space; subsequently, we perform a spatial affine registration of the posterized source images to this image. The intensity of the transformed images is normalized linearly, assuming that the histogram of the intensity values follows an alpha-stable distribution. Lastly, we build the [123I]FP-CIT SPECT template by means of the transformed and normalized images. The proposed methodology is a fully automatic procedure that has been shown to work accurately even when a high-resolution magnetic resonance image for each subject is not available.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partly supported by the MICINN of Spain under the TEC2012-34306 project and the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa (Junta de Andalucía, Spain) under the Excellence Projects P09-TIC-4530 and P11-TIC-7103. This work has also been supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship from the 7th Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF (Project: 624453 ALPHA-BRAIN-IMAGING).
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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The FP-CIT SPECT template (RRID:SciRes 000197) built in the MNI space can be downloaded from the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse: http://www.nitrc.org/ and from the Signal Processing and Biomedical Applications Group website: http://sipba.ugr.es/descargas/.
This work has been supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship from the 7th Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF (Project: 624453 ALPHA-BRAIN-IMAGING).
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Salas-Gonzalez, D., Górriz, J.M., Ramírez, J. et al. Building a FP-CIT SPECT Brain Template Using a Posterization Approach. Neuroinform 13, 391–402 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-015-9262-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-015-9262-9