Nonrigid Registration of Multiple Sclerosis Brain Images Using Lesion Inpainting for Morphometry or Lesion Mapping

Morphometric studies of medical images often include a nonrigid registration step from a Subject to a common reference. The presence of white matter multiple sclerosis lesions will distort and bias the output of the registration. In this article, we present a method to remove this bias by filling such lesions to make the brain look like a healthy brain before the registration. We finally propose a dedicated method to fill the lesions and present numerical results showing that our method outperforms current state of the art method. Hum Brain Mapp 30:1060-1067, 2009. (C) 2008 Wiley-Liss. Inc.