Matching deformable atlas models to preprocessed magnetic resonance brain images

We describe a method for automatically labelling regions of three-dimensional (3-D) Magnetic Resonance (MR) scans of human brains. Labelling consists of attaching anatomic names to particular regions of the cortical surface that appear in these images. The approach we take is to automatically match a deformable anatomical atlas model to preprocessed brain images, where preprocessing consists of 3-D Marr-Hildreth edge detection and morphological operations. These filtering operations automatically extract the brain and sulci from an MR image and provide a smoothed representation of the brain surface to which the deformable model can rapidly converge. The model itself is a 3-D B-spline surface whose control vertices are chosen to minimize a cost function that reflects the distance of the model from boundary-like features in the image. Minimization takes place using a conjugate gradient technique