Homothetical warping of brain MR images

We have developed a new method for warping MR brain images to other brain images or to the atlas data, We first use a deformable contour model to extract and warp the boundaries of the two brain images. We use a balloon force in this stage to ensure good matching of the final contour to the brain boundaries regardless of the initial contour. The applied deformable contour model captures the general shape of each brain from its boundary contour, after which, the outer boundaries can be mapped to each other. A mesh grid coordinate system is constructed for each brain thereafter, by applying a distance transformation to the resulting contours. The first image is mapped to the other image based on a one-to-one mapping between different layers defined by a mesh grid coordinate system.