Automatic DTI-based parcellation of the corpus callosum through the watershed transform

Brazilian Journal of Biomedical Engineering, 2014

Parcellation of the corpus callosum (CC) in the midsagittal cross-section of the brain is of utmost importance for the study of diffusion properties within this structure. The complexity of this operation comes from the absence of macroscopic anatomical landmarks to help in dividing the CC into different callosal areas. In this paper we propose a completely automatic method for CC parcellation using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). A dataset of 15 diffusion MRI volumes from normal subjects was used. For each subject, the midsagital slice was automatically detected based on the Fractional Anisotropy (FA) map. Then, segmentation of the CC in the midsgital slice was performed using the hierarchical watershed transform over a weighted FA-map. Finally, parcellation of the CC was obtained through the application of the watershed transform from chosen markers. Parcellation results obtained were consistent for fourteen of the fifteen subjects tested. Results were similar to the ones obtained from tractography-based methods. Tractography confirmed that the cortical regions associated with each obtained CC region were consistent with the literature. A completely automatic DTI-based parcellation method for the CC was designed and presented. It is not based on tractography, which makes it fast and computationally inexpensive. While most of the existing methods for parcellation of the CC determine an average behavior for the subjects based on population studies, the proposed method reflects the diffusion properties specific for each subject. Parcellation boundaries are found based on the diffusion properties within each individual CC, which makes it more reliable and less affected by differences in size and shape among subjects.

Full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1590/rbeb.2014.012