Reconstruction of the human hippocampus in 3D from histology and high-resolution ex-vivo MRI

In this paper, we present methods for the reconstruction of 3D histological volumes of the human hippocampal formation from histology slices. Inter-slice alignment is guided by a graph-theoretic approach that minimizes the impact of badly distorted slices. The reconstruction is refined by iterative affine and deformable co-registration with a high-resolution MRI of the postmortem tissue sample. We present an evaluation of reconstruction accuracy that is based on measures of similarity between boundaries drawn on both histology and MRI. Our methodology is currently being applied to an MRI atlas of the human hippocampal formation, in which atlas anatomical labels are derived from segmentation of reconstructed histology.