Automatic recognition of cortical Sulci using a congregation of neural networks

Abstract

This paper describes a complete system allowing automatic recognition of the main sulci of the human cortex. This system relies on a preprocessing of MR images leading to abstract structural representations of the cortical folding. The representation nodes are cortical folds, which are given a sulcus name by a contextual pattern recognition method. This method can be interpreted as a graph matching approach, which is driven by the minimization of a global function made up of local potentials. Each potential is a measure of the likelihood of the labelling of a restricted area. This potential is given by a multi-layer perceptron trained on a learning database. A base of 26 brains manually labelled by a neuroanatomist is used to validate our approach. The whole system developed for the right hemisphere is made up of 265 neural networks.