A new strategy to improve coregistration of spect and MR images in patients with high grade glioma

This paper proposes a new strategy to optimize the coregistration of Technetium-99m Sestamibi SPECT and MRI data in case of patients with high grade glioma. It consists in a personalized approach which selects, for each data set, the best registration method among several ones. To achieve this selection, a quantitative dedicated evaluation criterion based on the average intensities within specific anatomical structures corresponding to physiological areas of uptake of Sestamibi was defined. The strategy was applied to sixty-two data sets using nine registration methods based on mutual information and chamfer distance registration approaches, with different settings. It was implemented within the Anatomist/Brainvisa environment, using its basic registration functions. The visual evaluation by experts indicated that this strategy provides 60% good quality registrations, and 26% intermediate quality ones. Compared to the single use of the best global registration method, the number of registrations of good quality was multiplied by 1.4 when using the data specific strategy.