Corelative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) image registration by blood vessel axes alignment

Correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) is a multi-modal microscopy approach that contains complementary information from light (LM) and electron microscopy (EM). CLEM image alignment can be a challenging task for both the biological expert as well as for existing automated methods. This work introduces a novel method that focuses on aligning the medial axes of blood vessels in both the LM and EM modalities. Evaluation of 3D CLEM image registration problems shows that this approach obtains an accurate alignment in an intuitive and robust way. This method holds potential as a valuable tool for global and local alignment of a subset of challenging CLEM image alignment problems, both as guidance in a manual setting or in a more automated workflow.