Watershed-based Segmentation of the Midsagittal Section of the Corpus Callosum in Diffusion MRI

Abstract -The corpus callosum (CC) is one of the most important white matter structures of the brain, interconnecting the two cerebral hemispheres. The CC is related to several diseases including dyslexia, autism, multiple sclerosis and lupus, which make its study even more important. We propose here a new approach for fully automatic segmentation of the midsagittal section of CC in magnetic resonance diffusion tensor images, including the automatic determination of the midsagittal slice of the brain . It uses the watershed transform and is performed on the fractional anisotropy map weighted by the projection of the principal eigenvector in the left-right direction. Experiments with real diffusion MRI data showed that the proposed method is able to quickly segment the CC and to the determinate the midsagittal slice without any user intervention. Since it is simple, fast a nd does not require parameter settings, the proposed method is well suited for clinical applications