Model-based Automatic AC/PC Detection on Three-dimensional MRI Scans Babak A. Ardekani, Ph.D., Alvin H. Bachman, Ph.D., Ali Tabesh, Ph.D. The Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY
The anterior and posterior commissures are bundles of transverse white matter fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres
The AC and PC landmarks are intersection points of these fibers with the mid-sagittal plane AC PC
Aim To develop an algorithm for automatic detection of the AC/PC on 3D structural MRI scans
Applications Orientation of the human brain for computerized image analysis Definition of coordinate systems in brain atlases (Talairach-Tournoux; Schaltenbrand-Wahren) Placement and orientation of the imaging FOV in MRI acquisition Image registration
Example application FOV placement for MRI acquisition
Method 3D template matching Normalized cross-correlation (NCC) similarity measure
Template definition AC/PC and MPJ landmarks are manually placed on example images by an expert
Detect the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) Detect midbrain-pons junction (MPJ) Detect AC/PC Update MSP MRI volume Save AC/PD Save MSP MPJ template AC/PC templates Algorithm
MSP detection Ax + By + Cz = 1 Ardekani et al., IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging, 1997.
Detect the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) Detect midbrain-pons junction (MPJ) Detect AC/PC Update MSP MRI volume Save AC/PD Save MSP MPJ template AC/PC templates Algorithm
MPJ detection Candidate MPJ points are detection on a circular search region by template matching using NCC
Detect the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) Detect midbrain-pons junction (MPJ) Detect AC/PC Update MSP MRI volume Save AC/PD Save MSP MPJ template AC/PC templates Algorithm
AC/PC detection The AC/PC are detected based on each possible MPJ location
AC/PC detection The final decision is made by adding the NCC’s of all three landmarks
Detect the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) Detect midbrain-pons junction (MPJ) Detect AC/PC Update MSP MRI volume Save AC/PD Save MSP MPJ template AC/PC templates Algorithm
MRI data 36 healthy volunteers, 17 patients with chronic schizophrenia (total: 53 scans) Siemens Vision 1.5T 3D T 1 -weighted MPRAGE structural MRI scans TR=11.6 ms, TE=4.9 ms, =8 , Matrix=256×256×190, 1 mm 3 voxels
Template definition 3 patient (top row) and 3 control (bottom row) scans were used to construct templates for AC/PC and MPJ
Results Qualitatively correct AC/PC locations were detected on 52 of the 53 cases.
Results The 1 scan on which the algorithm failed
Results 5 of 53 scans had severe artifacts
Results Processing time: 6 s on Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz (4.5 s MSP detection s AC/PC detection); 2 s on Quad Core Intel Xeon E5430, 2.66 GHz
Results: Manual vs. automatic detection ACPC Average error0.86 mm0.85 mm Maximum error1.60 mm1.74 mm Error < 1.0 mm34/4233/42 3D Euclidean distance (error) between manually and automatically detected AC/PC in 42 scans (53-6-5=42)
Summary Fast, accurate, robust, and fully automatic AC/PC detection Algorithm can be trained for contrasts other than T 1 (e.g., T 2 -weighted FSE) Algorithm shows robustness with respect to field strength, pulse sequence parameters, subject population Available on