Brain surface maps from 3-D medical images

The anatomic and functional localization of brain lesions for neurologic diagnosis and brain surgery is facilitated by labeling the cortical surface in 3D images. This paper presents a method which extracts cortical contours from magnetic resonance (MR) image series and then produces a planar surface map which preserves important anatomic features. The resultant map may be used for manual anatomic localization as well as for further automatic labeling. Outer contours are determined on MR cross-sectional images by following the clear boundaries between gray matter and cerebral-spinal fluid, skipping over sulci. Carrying this contour below the surface by shrinking it along its normal produces an inner contour that alternately intercepts gray matter (sulci) and white matter along its length. This procedure is applied to every section in the set, and the image (grayscale) values along the inner contours are radially projected and interpolated onto a semi-cylindrical surface with axis normal to the slices and large enough to cover the whole brain. A planar map of the cortical surface results by flattening this cylindrical surface. The projection from inner contour to cylindrical surface is unique in the sense that different points on the inner contour correspond to different points on the cylindrical surface. As the outer contours are readily obtained by automatic segmentation, cortical maps can be made directly from an MR series.