title: Fast, accurate, and automatic extraction of the modified Talairach cortical landmarks from magnetic resonance images.
abstract: The Talairach transformation is the most prevalent way to normalize brains and is hindered by, among others things, a lack of automatic determination of cortical landmarks. An algorithm to locate the modified Talairach cortical landmarks in three steps is proposed: determination of the three planes containing the landmarks; segmentation of the planes based on range-constrained thresholding and morphologic operations; and local refinement of the segmentation to locate the landmarks. The algorithm has been validated against 62 T(1)-weighted and SPGR MR diversified data sets. For each data set, it takes less than 2 s on a Pentium 4 to extract all six landmarks. The average landmark location errors are below 0.9 mm. The algorithm is robust due to incorporation of anatomic knowledge. A low computational cost results from processing of three 2D images and employing only simple operations like thresholding, basic morphologic operations, and distance transform.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Imaging Lab, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, 30 Biopolis Street, 07-01 Matrix, Singapore. huqm@bii.a-star.edu.sg
authors.forename: Qingmao
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Guoyu
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Qian
authors.forename: Wieslaw L
authors.initials: WL
authors.lastname: Nowinski
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity