Registration of Magnetic Resonance Images of the Prostate Obtained with an Endorectal Coil to Histological Sections

Introduction Validation of findings from in vivo imaging (e.g. MRI) of the prostate requires precise correlation of histopathological information on a voxel-by-voxel basis, with sub-millimeter accuracy in the absence of identifiable anatomic landmarks. A method is developed to register histopathology sections and in vivo MR images of the prostate obtained with a combination of a phased-array and an endodrectal coil. Previous relevant work includes co-registration and warping of MR images to histolopathologic sections using nonlinear thin-plate splines in small animal studies (1) and co-registration of histolopathological and MR images of the prostate using both boundary and internal landmarks with thin-plate splines (2). Here we present a 2D semiautomatic nonrigid registration using free-form deformation (FFD) based on B-splines (3) to co-register MR images to histopathological sections. Landmarks are used to match the corresponding MR images and histopathological slides.