MR to Histology Registration Workflow

Blake E. Zimmerman, Sara L. Johnson, Henrik A. Odéen, Jill E. Shea, Rachel E. Factor, Sarang C. Joshi, and Allison H. Payne

• Paper (pdf)
• Video

Advances in imaging and early cancer detection have increased interest in magnetic resonance (MR) guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) technologies for cancer treatment. MRgFUS ablation treatments could reduce surgical risks, preserve organ tissue/function, and improve patient quality of life. MR features can be used to assess the extent of MRgFUS treatment, but MR features need to be validated against gold standard histology images. In this project, we developed a novel MR to histology registration workflow that utilizes intermediate imaging steps to perform registration and facilitate one-to-one correlation between histology and MR images. A novel contribution of this work is a 3D, surface-based deformable block reconstruction method (left image) to relate 2D histology images to the 3D MRI space. The presented workflow yields an overall registration accuracy of 1.00 +/- 0.13 mm. With an accurate registration between MR and histology, features from MRI can be spatially compared against the gold standard histology features in both the 2D histology space and in the volumetric MRI space (right image). Evaluating MR features against histology using this registration pipeline will facilitate validating novel MRgFUS features to improve treatment assessment without surgical intervention. All of the 3D surface based registration and image registration is implemented in the CAMP repository. The video linked below gives an animated overview of the entire workflow.