Fast And Automatic Curvilinear Reformatting Of Mr Images Of The Brain For Diagnosis Of Dysplastic Lesions

Abstract

Curvilinear reformatting is known as the best non-invasive technique for diagnosis of dysplastic lesions of the brain. It consists of computing surfaces that follow the brain's curvature at various depths, making the diagnosis possible by visual inspection of the voxel intensities on these surfaces. Traditional approaches require user intervention and present curvature artifacts. We present a new method for curvilinear reformatting that solves both problems. It uses a graph-based approach to segment the brain, extract its envelope, and compute the isosurfaces at all possible depths by euclidean distance transform. It requires no user input, no ad-hoc parameters, and takes less than 1 minute to run on a common PC. © 2006 IEEE.2006486489Barkovich, A.J., Rowley, H.A., Andermann, F., MR in partial epilepsy: Value of high-resolution volumetric techniques (1995) American Journal of Neuroradiology, 16, pp. 339-343. , FebBastos, A.C., Comeau, R.M., Andermann, F., Melanson, D., Cendes, F., Dubeau, F., Fontaine, S., Olivier, A., Diagnosis of subtle focal dysplastic lesions: Curvilinear reformatting from three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (1999) Annals of Neurology, 46 (1), pp. 88-94Colombo, N., Tassi, L., Galli, C., Citterio, A., Lo Russo, G., Scialfa, G., Spreafico, R., Focal cortical dysplasias: MR imaging, histopathologic, and clinical correlations in surgically treated patients with epilepsy (2003) American Journal of Neuroradiology, 24, pp. 724-733. , AprBrainSight, , http://www.rogue-research.com/B/epilepsy.htmFrackowiak, R.S.J., Friston, K.J., Frith, C., Dolan, R., Price, C.J., Zeki, S., Ashburner, J., Penny, W.D., (2003) Human Brain Function, , Academic Press, 2nd editionBueno, G., Musse, O., Heitz, F., Armspach, J.P., Three-dimensional segmentation of anatomical structures in MR images on large data bases (2001) Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 19, pp. 73-88Dougherty, E.R., Lotufo, R.A., (2003) Hands-on Morphological Image Processing, , SPIE Press, Bellingham, WAFalcão, A.X., Stolfi, J., Lotufo, R.A., The image foresting transform: Theory, algorithms, and applications (2004) IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 26 (1), pp. 19-29Falcão, A.X., Bergo, F.P.G., Miranda, P.A.V., Image segmentation by tree pruning (2004) Proc. of the XVII Brazillian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing., pp. 65-71. , Oct , IEEEFalcão, A.X., Miranda, P.A.V., Bergo, F.P.G., (2005) Automatic Object Detection by Tree Pruning, , Tech. Rep. IC-05-19, Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, SepOtsu, N., A threshold selection method from gray level histograms (1979) IEEE Trans. Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 9, pp. 62-66. , Ma