Checking Image Registration

Visually checking your image registration - in other words, the overlap between images aligned in a common space - is one of the staples of any FMRI analysis pipeline. Sadly, although everyone says that you should do it, not many people go through the trouble of looking of visually inspecting image overlap; even though, in my opinion, I think that checking your image registration is one of the sexiest things you can do. "Sexier than brushing your teeth at least once a week?" Not quite, but we gettin' there!

Example of faulty image registration. Each set of orthogonal views represents a single subject's mask after first-level analysis. The orthogonal views highlighted with the yellow rectangle has suffered - terribly - from an error in image registration during preprocessing, which should be inspected further before doing a higher-level analysis.

In order to increase your attractiveness, I've written up a brief script - possibly my masterpiece - which will allow you to easily check the registration of a specified image. For example, you may want to check the masks for a group of subjects to make sure that they overlap, as a single mask which is far different from the others will lead to a truncated group mask. While not necessarily unsexy, missteps like these will only lead to average attractiveness. In other words, there's not anything really wrong with you, and there might be plenty of people who would settle for you, but...meh.


More details, including a demonstration of the script in action, can be seen in the following video.