Cerebral Surface Extraction from Neonatal MR Images using Cerebral Surface Model

It is known that Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy of the neonate decreases the cerebral volume. And, the volume decrement occurs at the different rate on each gyrus. Therefore, it is helpful for diagnosing such symptoms to segment the cerebral region from neonatal MR images and measure the volume of each gyms. Many conventional methods for segmenting brain region from adult brain MR images have been proposed. However, in case of neonatal subjects, these methods cannot extract the sulci correctly. This paper proposes a method for extracting the cerebral contour accurately using cerebral surface model, which is the novel segmentation algorithm proposed in this paper. We applied the proposed method to computer synthesized images and MR images of a neonatal subject. The experimental results showed that the proposed method extracted the cerebral contour well.