AN INTERACTIVE PROCEDURE FOR EXTRACTING FEATURES OF THE BRAIN FROM MAGNETIC-RESONANCE IMAGES - THE LOBES

The human brain can be subdivided many ways depending upon the criteri a used. One of the most basic approaches is to subdivide the cortical regions into functional units composed of the frontal, occipital, pari etal, and temporal lobes. To date, the process of reliably extracting measurements of the human brain from MR images has been mostly depende nt on subjective decisions made by operators tracing regions. We prese nt a technique for the identification of the cortical lobes of the bra in based upon an interactive extraction program. It requires an operat or to identify a fixed set of neuroanatomical guides which are used al ong with segmentation information to map automatically in three dimens ions the full extent of each lobe without further editing by the opera tor. The definitions of the lobes are based upon standard, fully accep ted, neuroanatomical criteria which can readily be found in the stack of images obtained from each subject. We have used this technique in t his report on a subset of images from both healthy control subjects an d patients with clinically confirmed memory disorders in order to esta blish its interoperator and intraoperator reliability. (C) 1997 Wiley- Liss, Inc.