Optimization of landmark selection for cortical surface registration

Manually labeled landmark sets are often required as inputs for landmark-based image registration. Identifying an optimal subset of landmarks from a training dataset may be useful in reducing the labor intensive task of manual labeling. In this paper, we present a new problem and a method to solve it: given a set of N landmarks, find the k(<; N) best landmarks such that aligning these k landmarks that produce the best overall alignment of all N landmarks. The resulting procedure allows us to select a reduced number of landmarks to be labeled as a part of the registration procedure. We apply this methodology to the problem of registering cerebral cortical surfaces extracted from MRI data. We use manually traced sulcal curves as landmarks in performing inter-subject registration of these surfaces. To minimize the error metric, we analyze the correlation structure of the sulcal errors in the landmark points by modeling them as a multivariate Gaussian process. Selection of the optimal subset of sulcal curves is performed by computing the error variance for the subset of unconstrained landmarks conditioned on the constrained set. We show that the registration error predicted by our method closely matches the actual registration error. The method determines optimal curve subsets of any given size with minimal registration error.