Summer2009:Registration reproducibility in Slicer

• 

  Project Week Main Page

• Registration reproducibility1.jpg

  tbd

• Registration reproducibility2.jpg

  tbd

Key Investigators

• BWH: Andriy Fedorov, Steve Pieper, Tina Kapur
• GE: Jim Miller
• Kitware: Luis Ibanez
• EAB: Bill Lorensen

Objective

Rigid registration in general, and RigidRegistration module of Slicer3 in particular, are important workflow components for a number of applications.

We found gross inconsistency between the result of using rigid registration module on volumetric brain MRI in GUI vs command line invocation. There is also significant difference between command line invocations of the module on different platforms, which cannot be explained by numerical precision errors. The issue has been confirmed independently by Andriy, Bill, Jim and Steve. It was also confirmed by Kilian. The problem is thoroughly documented in Slicer3 bug 416.

We would like to understand the source of this inconsistency, together with the understanding what is reasonable to expect expect in terms of reproducibility from such complex numerical codes like rigid registration.

Approach, Plan

TBD

• More general question: what is the correct way to test reproducibility for this kind of applications?

Progress

• added testing mode to RigidRegistration to measure the maximum difference
• abused Slicer3 dashboard to collect the magnitude of difference on various platforms

References

• Mantis entry for bug 416