RAPID AUTOMATIC BRAIN VOLUMETRY ON THE BASIS OF MULTISPECTRAL 3D MR-IMAGING DATA ON PERSONAL COMPUTERS

Fast magnetic resonance imaging sequences are an excellent basis for t he volumetry of the human brain. We present a concept for an automatic three-dimensional (3D) segmentation and volumetry which provides rapi d image processing along with minimal requirements of manual interacti on on low-end hardware platforms. The concept is based on standard ima ge segmentation techniques and provides for the determination of the t otal brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid volumes from the input data base, a T1-and a T2-weighted 3D image data cube. We used a 3D MPRAGE s equence for the T1- and a 3D PSIF sequence for the T2-weighted images; both 3D image data cubes consisted of 128 sagittal image slices with a voxel size of 1.0 x 1.0 x 1.2 mm3. The segmentation and volumetry to ol was applied to clinical image data of volunteers and Alzheimer pati ents in order to prove its stability.