Automatic sulcal line extraction on cortical surfaces using geodesic path density maps

作者：Le Troter A; Auzias G; Coulon O^*

来源：NeuroImage, 2012, 61(4): 941-949.

DOI：10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.04.021

• Sulcal lines
• Geodesic path
• Geodesic path density map
• Cortical surface matching

We present here a method that is designed to automatically extract sulcal lines on the mesh of any cortical surface. The method is based on the definition of a new function, the Geodesic Path Density Map (GPDM), within each sulcal basin (i.e. regions with a negative mean curvature). GPDM indicates at each vertex the likelihood that a shortest path between any two points of the basins boundary goes through that vertex. If the distance used to compute shortest path is anisotropic and constrained by a geometric information such as the depth, the GPDM indicates the likelihood that a vertex belongs to the sulcal line in the basin. An automatic GPDM adaptive thresholding procedure is proposed and sulcal lines are then defined. The process has been validated on a set of 25 subjects by comparing results to the manual segmentation from an expert and showed an average error below 2 mm. It is also compared to our previous reference method in the context of inter-subject cortical surface registration and shows an significant improvement in performance.

• 出版日期2012-7-16