Image registration

SliceMap

Whole brain tissue slices are commonly used in neurobiological research for analyzing pathological features in an anatomically defined manner. However, since many pathologies are expressed in specific regions of the brain, it is necessary to have an annotation of the regions in the brain slices. Such an annotation can be done by manual delineation, as done most often, or by an automated region annotation tool.

SliceMap is a FIJI/ImageJ plugin for automated brain region annotation of fluorescent brain slices. The plugin uses a reference library of pre-annotated brain slices (the brain region templates) to annotate brain regions of unknown samples. To perform the region annotation, SliceMap registers the reference slices to the sample slice (using elastic registration plugin BUnwarpJ) and uses the resulting image transformations to morph the template regions towards the anatomical brain regions of the sample. The resulting brain regions are saved as FIJI/ImageJ ROI’s (Regions Of Interest) as a single zip-file for each sample slice.

More information can also be found in "SliceMap: an algorithm for automated brain region annotation", Michaël Barbier, Astrid Bottelbergs, Rony Nuydens, Andreas Ebneth, Winnok H De Vos, Bioinformatics, btx658, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btx658

The Multiview Reconstruction software package enables users to register, fuse, deconvolve and view multiview microscopy images. The software is designed for lightsheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM), but is applicable to any form of three or higher dimensional imaging modalities like confocal timeseries or multicolor stacks. 

The BigDataViewer is a re-slicing browser for terabyte-sized multi-view image sequences. BigDataViewer was developed with multi-view light-sheet microscopy data in mind and integrates well with Fiji's SPIMage processing pipeline.

Bigwarp is a tool for manual, interactive, landmark-based deformable image alignment. It uses the BigDataViewer for visualization and navigation, and uses a Thin Plate Spline implemented in Java to build a deformation from point correspondences.

The BigStitcher is a software package that allows simple and efficient alignment of multi-tile and multi-angle image datasets, for example acquired by lightsheet, widefield or confocal microscopes. The software supports images of almost arbitrary size ranging from very small images up to volumes in the range of many terabytes, which are for example produced when acquiring cleared tissue samples with lightsheet microscopy.