Articulated Whole-Body Atlases for Small Animal Image Analysis: Construction and Applications

Khmelinskii, A.; Baiker, M.; Kaijzel, E.L.; Chen, J.; Reiber, J.H.C.; Lelieveldt, B.P.F.

doi:doi:10.1007/s11307-010-0386-x

Articulated Whole-Body Atlases for Small Animal Image Analysis: Construction and Applications

Title

Articulated Whole-Body Atlases for Small Animal Image Analysis: Construction and Applications

Author

Khmelinskii, A.
Baiker, M.
Kaijzel, E.L.
Chen, J.
Reiber, J.H.C.
Lelieveldt, B.P.F.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Intelligent Systems

Date

2010-09-08

Abstract

Purpose Using three publicly available small-animal atlases (Sprague–Dawley rat, MOBY, and Digimouse), we built three articulated atlases and present several applications in the scope of molecular imaging. Procedures Major bones/bone groups were manually segmented for each atlas skeleton. Then, a kinematic model for each atlas was built: each joint position was identified and the corresponding degrees of freedom were specified. Results The articulated atlases enable automated registration into a common coordinate frame of multimodal small-animal imaging data. This eliminates the postural variability (e.g., of the head, back, and front limbs) that occurs in different time steps and due to modality differences and nonstandardized acquisition protocols. Conclusions The articulated atlas proves to be a useful tool for multimodality image combination, follow-up studies, and image processing in the scope of molecular imaging. The proposed models were made publicly available.

Subject

small animal imaging
C57BL/6
C3H mouse
SD rat
articulated atlas
image processing
registration
microCT
BLI
microMRI