Expanding the Computational Anatomy Gateway from clinical imaging to basic neuroscience research

Abstract

The Computational Anatomy Gateway, powered largely by the Comet (San Diego Super-computer Center) and Stampede (Texas Advanced Computing Center) clusters through XSEDE, provides software as a service tools for atlas based analysis of human brain magnetic resonance images. This includes deformable registration, automatic labeling of tissue types, and morphometric analysis. Our goal is to extend these services to the broader neuroscience community, accommodating multiple model organisms and imaging modalities, as well as low quality or missing data. We developed a new approach to multimodality registration: by predicting one modality from another, we can replace ad hoc image similarity metrics (such as mutual information or normalized cross correlation) with a log likelihood under a noise model. This statistical approach enables us to account for missing data using the Expectation Maximization algorithm. For portability and scalability we have implemented this algorithm in tensorflow. For accessibility we have compiled and many working examples for multiple model organisms, imaging systems, and missing tissue or image anomaly situations. These examples are made easily usable in the form of Jupyter notebooks, and made publicly available through github. This framework will significantly reduce the barrier to entry for basic neuroscientists, enabling the community to benefit from atlas based computational image analysis techniques.