A statistical atlas-based technique for automatic segmentation of the first Heschl´s gyrus in human auditory cortex from MR images

We present an automatic method for the segmentation of the first transverse temporal gyrus of Heschl (HG), the morphological marker for primary auditory cortex in humans. The proposed technique utilizes a statistical anatomical atlas of the gyrus, generated from a set of training samples using principal component analysis. The training set consists of MRI data from 12 subjects with the corresponding Heschl´s gyri manually labeled in each hemisphere (separate atlases were generated for each hemisphere). We used a leave-one-out approach to automatically segment Heschl´s gyri in both hemispheres from the MR image data using generated atlases. We assessed the accuracy of this atlas-based technique by using it to segment the HG region from several test cases and finding the overlap between the segmented and labeled HG regions. Results demonstrated more than 75% and 83% accuracy in the extraction of the HG volumes in the left and right hemispheres, respectively. It is expected that the proposed tool can be adapted to extract other anatomical regions in the brain.