An efficient automatic midsagittal plane extraction in brain MRI

Abstract

In this paper, a fully automatic and computationally efficient midsagittal plane (MSP) extraction technique in brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs) has been proposed. Automatic detection of MSP in neuroimages can significantly aid in registration of medical images, asymmetric analysis, and alignment or tilt correction (recenter and reorientation) in brain MRIs. The parameters of MSP are estimated in two steps. In the first step, symmetric features and principal component analysis (PCA)-based technique is used to vertically align the bilateral symmetric axis of the brain. In the second step, PCA is used to achieve a set of parallel lines (principal axes) from the selected two-dimensional (2-D) elliptical slices of brain MRIs, followed by a plane fitting using orthogonal regression. The developed algorithm has been tested on 157 real T1-weighted brain MRI datasets including 14 cases from the patients with brain tumors. The presented algorithm is compared with a state-of-the-art approach based on bilateral symmetry maximization. Experimental results revealed that the proposed algorithm is fast (< 1.04 s per MRI volume) and exhibits superior performance in terms of accuracy and precision (a mean z-distance of 0.336 voxels and a mean angle difference of 0.06).