3-D Registration of Biological Images and Models: Registration of microscopic images and its uses in segmentation and annotation

The registration, segmentation, and annotation of microscopy images and respective biological objects (e.g., cells) are distinct challenges often encountered in bioimage informatics. Here we present several studies in widely used model systems of the fruit fly, zebrafish, and C. elegans to demonstrate how registration methods have been employed to align three-dimensional (3-D) brain images at a very large scale and to solve challenging segmentation and annotation problems for 3-D cellular images. Specifically, we consider two types of registration between images and models: image-to-image registration and model-to-image registration, where a model consists of a description of the geometrical shape or the spatial layout of biological objects in the respective images.