Chapter 3. T1 MRI data processing: Morphologist

Table of Contents

Introduction
Application: subject01
STEP 1 : Data importation
STEP 2: AC/PC spotting
STEP 3 : Morphologist pipeline
STEP 4 : Automatic sulci recognition
STEP 5 : Morphometry statistics
STEP 6 : Inflating cortical surface
Processing several subjects : subject02 and subject03
Import several images
Anatomical pipeline iteration
Automatic sulci recognition iteration
Sulci descriptors comparison

Introduction

In this practical work, we will use raw T1 MRI images of the human brain with 1mm resolution. We will use the BrainVISA Morphologist toolbox to process the data. From the raw data, we will do several processing steps : segmentation, 3D meshes construction, sulci extraction and identification, morphometry...

The main processing steps will be:

  • Data importation : raw data importation in the BrainVISA database.

  • AC/PC spotting : spotting these points gives reference points common to all subjects and enables to reorient the image if needed.

  • Segmentation pipeline (Morphologist) : pipeline made up of several processing steps : bias correction, histogram analysis, brain mask segmentation, hemispheres segmentation, cortical surface and white matter surface 3D meshes construction, sulci extraction.

  • Sulci automatic recognition : automatic labelling of sulci.

Then we will see a couple of other useful processes that can be applied to the previous results:

  • Morphometry statistics : measures and information extraction about labelled sulci.

  • Inflate cortical surface : computes an inflated cortical surface from an hemisphere white matter mesh got with the T1 pipeline. This inflated mesh can be used for visualization purpose.