INTEGRATION OF FUNCTIONAL AND ANATOMICAL BRAIN IMAGES

This article concerns the integration of functional and anatomical vol umetric brain images. Integration consists of two steps: matching or r egistration, where the images are brought into spatial agreement, and fusion or simultaneous display where the registered multimodal image i nformation is presented in an integrated fashion. Approaches to regist er multiple images are divided into extrinsic methods based on artific ial markers, and intrinsic matching methods based solely on the patien t related image data. The various methods are compared by a number of characteristics, which leads to a clear preference for one class of in trinsic methods, viz. voxel-based matching. Furthermore, two- and thre e-dimensional techniques to display multimodality image information ar e outlined. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.