A new symmetry-based method for mid-sagittal plane extraction in neuroimages

The estimation of the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) is a known problem with several applications in neuroimage analysis. As advance to the state-of-the-art, we present a considerably better approach for MSP extraction based on bilateral symmetry maximization and a more suitable error metric to compare MSP estimation methods. The proposed method was quantitatively evaluated using three other state-of-the-art approaches as baselines and a heterogeneous dataset with 164 clinical images. It outperformed the others in accuracy and precision, being well succeeded on all images. Besides, it does not present limitations with respect to the imaging protocol and initial position of the head, and it is one of the fastest methods in the literature, taking around 30 seconds on a regular workstation.