The Influence of Intensity Standardization on Medical Image Registration

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates how intensity standardization affects the accuracy of medical image registration, demonstrating that intensity variations significantly degrade registration performance.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of intensity standardization on MRI registration accuracy through extensive experiments.

Findings

Intensity variations impair registration accuracy.

Standardization improves registration performance.

Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations support these conclusions.

Abstract

Acquisition-to-acquisition signal intensity variations (non-standardness) are inherent in MR images. Standardization is a post processing method for correcting inter-subject intensity variations through transforming all images from the given image gray scale into a standard gray scale wherein similar intensities achieve similar tissue meanings. The lack of a standard image intensity scale in MRI leads to many difficulties in tissue characterizability, image display, and analysis, including image segmentation. This phenomenon has been documented well; however, effects of standardization on medical image registration have not been studied yet. In this paper, we investigate the influence of intensity standardization in registration tasks with systematic and analytic evaluations involving clinical MR images. We conducted nearly 20,000 clinical MR image registration experiments and evaluated the quality of registrations both quantitatively and qualitatively. The evaluations show that intensity variations between images degrades the accuracy of registration performance. The results imply that the accuracy of image registration not only depends on spatial and geometric similarity but also on the similarity of the intensity values for the same tissues in different images.