Affine and polynomial mutual information coregistration for artifact elimination in diffusion tensor imaging of newborns

We have investigated the use of two different image coregistration algorithms for identifying local regions of erroneously high fractional anisotropy (FA) as derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data sets in newborns. The first algorithm uses conventional affine registration of each of the diffusion-weighted images to the unweighted (b = 0) image for each slice, while the second algorithm uses second-order polynomial warping. Similarity between images was determined using the mutual information (MI) criterion, which is the preferred 'cost' criterion for coregistration of images with significantly different image intensity distributions. We have found that subtle differences exist in the FA values resulting from affine and second-order polynomial coregistration and demonstrate that nonlinear distortions introduce artifacts of spatial extent similar to real white matter structures in the newborn subcortex. We show that polynomial coregistration systematically reduces the presence of erroneous regions of high FA and that such artifacts can be identified by visual inspection of FA maps resulting from affine and polynomial coregistrations. Furthermore, we show that nonlinear distortions may be particularly pronounced when acquiring image slices of axial orientation at the height of the nasal cavity. Finally, we show that third-order polynomial MI coregistration (using the images resulting from second-order coregistration as input) has no observable effect on the resulting FA maps.