Graph-based topology correction for brain cortex segmentation

Abstract

Reconstructing a topologically correct representation of the brain cortex surface from magnetic resonance images is important in several medical and neuroscience applications. Most previous methods have either made drastic changes to the underlying anatomy or relied on hand-editing. Recently, a new technique due to Shattuck and Leahy yields a fully-automatic procedure with little distortion of the underlying segmentation. The present paper can be considered as an extension of this approach to include arbitrary cut directions and arbitrary digital connectivities. A detailed analysis of the method’s performance on 15 magnetic resonance brain images is provided.