Automatic Extraction of the Curved Midsagittal Brain Surface on MR Images

Many methods exist for the automatic extraction of the midsagittal plane from neuroimages, assuming bilateral symmetry. However, this assumption is incorrect owing to brain torque and the possible presence of pathology. In this paper, a method for extracting the curved midsagittal surface from brain images is presented.First, the method localizes the interhemispheric fissure with an existing technique for midsagittal plane extraction. Next, the plane is modelled as a bicubic spline and the configuration of the control points is optimized to obtain the midsagittal surface.The midsagittal surface results in a better segmentation of the cerebral hemispheres. Not only is the result visually more appealing, the absolute volume of misclassified tissue decreases significantly.