Automatic detection and labelling of the human cortical folds in magnetic resonance data sets

摘要

The folding of the corticla surface of the human brain varies dramatically from person to person. However, the folding pattern is not arbitrary. The cortical folds (also called "sulci") often serve as landmarks for referencing brain locations, and the most pronounced sulci have names that are well established in the neuroanatomical literature. In this paper, we will present a method that both automatically detects and attributes neuroanatomical names to these folds using image analysis methods applied to magnetic resonance data of human brains. More precisely, we subdivide each fold into a number of substructures which we call sulcal basins, and attach labels to these basins. These sulcal basins form a complete parcellation of the cortical surface.