Brain arteries movement detection with gated gradient echo sequence: standardization, registration and subtraction of serial magnetic resonance images

In order to make evident pulsing brain artery movements associated with heart activity, intramodality MR registration and subtraction has to be used to detect small differences between serial MR brain images. A new voxel-based rigid-body registration algorithm, including: (1) a standardization of grey levels procedure by means of similarity measure optimisation, (2) a new full 2-D convolution cubic interpolation zooming procedure, (3) a low computational cost multi-scale iterative procedure, that uses the zoomed versions of images to be registered, is proposed. It allows up to 1/8 pixel accuracy.