A novel approach to motion correction for ASL images based on brain contours

Motion correction in Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) is essential to accurately assess brain perfusion. Motion correction techniques are usually based on intensity-related information, which might be unreliable in ASL due to local intensity differences between control and labeled acquisitions and to non-uniform volume magnetization caused by background-suppressed acquisition protocols. Accordingly, a novel motion correction technique based only on brain contour points is presented and tested against a widely used intensity-based technique (MCFLIRT). The proposed Contour-Based Motion Correction (CBCM) technique relies on image segmentation (to extract brain contour point clouds) and on Iterative Closest Point algorithm (to estimate the roto-translation required to align them). At variance with other approaches based on point clouds alignment, the local 3D curvature is also computed for each contour point and used as an additional coordinate to increase the accuracy of the alignment. The technique has been tested along with MCFLIRT on a database of randomly roto-translated brain volumes. Several error metrics have been computed and compared between the two techniques. The results show that the proposed technique is able to achieve a higher accuracy than MCFLIRT without any intensity-dependent information.