MICCAI 2013 - LNCS 8149-8151

Combining Surface and Fiber Geometry: An Integrated Approach to Brain Morphology

Peter Savadjiev^{1, 2}, Yogesh Rathi², Sylvain Bouix², Alex R. Smith³, Robert T. Schultz⁴, Ragini Verma³, and Carl-Fredrik Westin¹

¹Laboratory for Mathematics in Imaging, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

²Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

³Section of Biomedical Image Analysis, Dept. of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

⁴Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Abstract. Despite the fact that several theories link cortical development and function to the development of white matter and its geometrical structure, the relationship between gray and white matter morphology has not been widely researched. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for investigating this relationship. Given a set of fiber tracts which connect to a particular cortical region, the key idea is to compute two scalar fields that represent geometrical characteristics of the white matter and of the surface of the cortical region. The distributions of these scalar values are then linked via Mutual Information, which results in a quantitative marker that can be used in the study of normal and pathological brain structure and development. We apply this framework to a population study on autism spectrum disorder in children.

LNCS 8149, p. 50 ff.

Full article in PDF | BibTeX