Mid-sagittal plane detection for advanced physiological measurements in brain scans

Objective : The process of diagnosing many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson ’s and
progressive supranuclear palsy, involves the study of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans
in order to identify and locate morphological markers that can highlight the health status of the
subject. A fundamental step in the pre-processing and analysis of MRI scans is the identification of
the mid-sagittal plane, which corresponds to the mid-brain and allows a coordinate reference system
for the whole MRI scan set. Approach : To improve the identification of the mid-sagittal plane we
have developed an algorithm in Matlab ® based on the k -means clustering function. The results have
been compared with the evaluation of four experts who manually identified the mid-sagittal plane and
whose performances have been combined with a cognitive decisional algorithm in order to define a
gold standard. Main results : The comparison provided a mean percenta...

Source: Physiological Measurement - December 2, 2019 Category: Physiology Authors: Francesca Bertacchini, Rossella Rizzo, Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano, Angela Luca, Alessandro Mazzuca, Antonio Lopez and for the Alzheimer ’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative Source Type: research