Block-based statistics for robust non-parametric morphometry

Automated algorithms designed for comparison of medical images are generally dependent on a sufficiently large dataset and highly accurate registration as they implicitly assume that the comparison is being made across a set of images with locally matching structures. However, very often sample size is limited and registration methods are not perfect and may be prone to errors due to noise, artifacts, and complex variations of brain topology. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical group comparison algorithm, called block-based statistics (BBS), which reformulates the conventional comparison framework from a non-local means perspective in order to learn what the statistics would have been, given perfect correspondence. Through this formulation, BBS (1) explicitly considers image registration errors to reduce reliance on high-quality registrations, (2) increases the number of samples for statistical estimation by collapsing measurements from similar signal distributions, and (3) diminishes the need for large image sets. BBS is based on permutation test and hence no assumption, such as Gaussianity, is imposed on the distribution. Experimental results indicate that BBS yields markedly improved lesion detection accuracy especially with limited sample size, is more robust to sample imbalance, and converges faster to results expected for large sample size.