Consistent sulcal parcellation of longitudinal cortical surfaces

Automatic consistent sulcal parcellation of longitudinal cortical surfaces is of great importance in studying morphological and functional changes of human brains. This paper proposes a novel energy-function based method for consist sulcal parcellation of longitudinal cortical surfaces. Specifically, both spatial and temporal smoothness are imposed in the energy function to obtain consistent longitudinal sulcal parcellation results. The proposed method has been successfully applied to sulcal parcellation of longitudinal inner cortical surfaces of 10 normal subjects, each with 4 scans acquired within 2 years. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.