Rapid and Automatic Extraction of the Modified Talairach Cortical Landmarks from MR Neuroimages

Abstract

An automatic algorithm to locate the modified Talairach cortical landmarks is proposed. Firstly, three planes containing the landmarks are determined, and the optimum thresholds robust to noise and inhomogeneity are calculated based on range-constrained thresholding. Then, the planes are segmented with the chosen thresholds and morphological operations. Finally the segmentation is refined and landmarks are located. The algorithm has been validated against 62 T1-weighted and SPGR MR diversified datasets. For each dataset, it takes less than 2 seconds on Pentium 4 (2.6 GHz) to extract the 6 modified Talairach cortical landmarks. The average landmark location error is below 1 mm. The algorithm is robust and accurate as the factors influencing the determination of cortical landmarks are carefully compensated. A low computational cost results from selecting three 2D planes to process and employing only simple operations. The algorithm is suitable for both research and clinical applications. © Springer-Verlag 2004.