A multi-modal 2D/3D registration scheme for preterm brain images.

Periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) is a neonatal brain pathology occurring on preterms with a very low birth weight (<1500 g). Next to ultrasound (US) imaging, which is the first and most common step, magnetic resonance image (MRI) volumes are used for the inspection of this pathology. Since on both modalities, up to now, we still lack a golden standard for the quantification of the pathology cross-validation through a multi-modal registration is highly beneficial to the clinical diagnosis. In this article we present a semi-automatic 2D US-3D MRI registration scheme combining an interactive initialization step, B-spline image interpolation, a mutual information based metric and an evolutionary algorithm optimization scheme.