Deformable reconstruction of histology sections using structural probability maps

The reconstruction of a 3D volume from a stack of 2D histology slices is still a challenging problem especially if no external references are available. Without a reference, standard registration approaches tend to align structures that should not be perfectly aligned. In this work we introduce a deformable, reference-free reconstruction method that uses an internal structural probability map (SPM) to regularize a free-form deformation. The SPM gives an estimate of the original 3D structure of the sample from the misaligned and possibly corrupted 2D slices. We present a consecutive as well as a simultaneous reconstruction approach that incorporates this estimate in a deformable registration framework. Experiments on synthetic and mouse brain datasets indicate that our method produces similar results compared to reference-based techniques on synthetic datasets. Moreover, it improves the smoothness of the reconstruction compared to standard registration techniques on real data.