A mean curvature based primal sketch to study the cortical folding process from antenatal to adult brain

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new representation of the cortical surface that may be used to study the cortex folding process and to recover foetus sulcal roots usually burried in the depth of adult brains. This representation is a primal sketch derived from a scale space computed for the mean curvature of the cortical surface. This scale-space stems from a geodesic diffusion equation conditionaly to the cortical surface. The primal sketch is made up of objects defined from mean curvature minima and saddle points. The resulting sketch aims first at highlighting significant elementary folds, second at representing the fold merging process during brain growth. The relevance of the framework is illustrated by the study of central sulcus sulcal roots in antenatal, baby and adult images.