Photoacoustic-MR Image Registration Based on a Co-Sparse Analysis Model to Compensate for Brain Shift

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 22; no. 6; p. 2399
• Main Authors: Farnia, Parastoo, Makkiabadi, Bahador, Alimohamadi, Maysam, Najafzadeh, Ebrahim, Basij, Maryam, Yan, Yan, Mehrmohammadi, Mohammad, Ahmadian, Alireza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 21-03-2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Algorithms; Animals; Biomechanics; Brain - diagnostic imaging; Brain - surgery; brain shift; co-sparse analysis; Deformation; Dictionaries; dictionary learning; Image registration; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Medical imaging; Mice; multimodal image registration; Neurosurgery; Neurosurgical Procedures - methods; Operators (mathematics); Phantoms, Imaging; photoacoustic imaging; Physiology; Polyvinyl alcohol; Registration; Surgery; Teaching methods; Ultrasonic imaging; brain shift; co-sparse analysis; dictionary learning; photoacoustic imaging; multimodal image registration
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s22062399

Brain shift is an important obstacle to the application of image guidance during neurosurgical interventions. There has been a growing interest in intra-operative imaging to update the image-guided surgery systems. However, due to the innate limitations of the current imaging modalities, accurate brain shift compensation continues to be a challenging task. In this study, the application of intra-operative photoacoustic imaging and registration of the intra-operative photoacoustic with pre-operative MR images are proposed to compensate for brain deformation. Finding a satisfactory registration method is challenging due to the unpredictable nature of brain deformation. In this study, the co-sparse analysis model is proposed for photoacoustic-MR image registration, which can capture the interdependency of the two modalities. The proposed algorithm works based on the minimization of mapping transform via a pair of analysis operators that are learned by the alternating direction method of multipliers. The method was evaluated using an experimental phantom and ex vivo data obtained from a mouse brain. The results of the phantom data show about 63% improvement in target registration error in comparison with the commonly used normalized mutual information method. The results proved that intra-operative photoacoustic images could become a promising tool when the brain shift invalidates pre-operative MRI.