In this paper, we propose a novel method for parcellating the human brain into 193 anatomical structures based on diffusion tensor images (DTIs). This was accomplished in the setting of multi-contrast diffeomorphic likelihood fusion using multiple DTI atlases. DTI images are modeled as high dimensional fields, with each voxel exhibiting a vector valued feature comprising of mean diffusivity (MD), fractional anisotropy (FA), and fiber angle. For each structure, the probability distribution of each element in the feature vector is modeled as a mixture of Gaussians, the parameters of which are estimated from the labeled atlases. The structure-specific feature vector is then used to parcellate the test image. For each atlas, a likelihood is iteratively computed based on the structure-specific vector feature. The likelihoods from multiple atlases are then fused. The updating and fusing of the likelihoods is achieved based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problems. We first demonstrate the performance of the algorithm by examining the parcellation accuracy of 18 structures from 25 subjects with a varying degree of structural abnormality. Dice values ranging 0.8–0.9 were obtained. In addition, strong correlation was found between the volume size of the automated and the manual parcellation. Then, we present scan-rescan reproducibility based on another dataset of 16 DTI images – an average of 3.73%, 1.91%, and 1.79% for volume, mean FA, and mean MD respectively. Finally, the range of anatomical variability in the normal population was quantified for each structure.

We propose a hierarchical pipeline for skull-stripping and segmentation of anatomical structures of interest from T1-weighted images of the human brain. The pipeline is constructed based on a two-level Bayesian parameter estimation algorithm called multi-atlas likelihood fusion (MALF). In MALF, estimation of the parameter of interest is performed via maximum a posteriori estimation using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The likelihoods of multiple atlases are fused in the E-step while the optimal estimator, a single maximizer of the fused likelihoods, is then obtained in the M-step. There are two stages in the proposed pipeline; first the input T1-weighted image is automatically skull-stripped via a fast MALF, then internal brain structures of interest are automatically extracted using a regular MALF. We assess the performance of each of the two modules in the pipeline based on two sets of images with markedly different anatomical and photometric contrasts; 3T MPRAGE scans of pediatric subjects with developmental disorders vs. 1.5T SPGR scans of elderly subjects with dementia. Evaluation is performed quantitatively using the Dice overlap as well as qualitatively via visual inspections. As a result, we demonstrate subject-level differences in the performance of the proposed pipeline, which may be accounted for by age, diagnosis, or the imaging parameters (particularly the field strength). For the subcortical and ventricular structures of the two datasets, the hierarchical pipeline is capable of producing automated segmentations with Dice overlaps ranging from 0.8 to 0.964 when compared with the gold standard. Comparisons with other representative segmentation algorithms are presented, relative to which the proposed hierarchical pipeline demonstrates comparative or superior accuracy.

Quantification of tissue magnetic susceptibility using MRI offers a non-invasive measure of important tissue components in the brain, such as iron and myelin, potentially providing valuable information about normal and pathological conditions during aging. Despite many advances made in recent years on imaging techniques of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), accurate and robust automated segmentation tools for QSM images that can help generate universal and sharable susceptibility measures in a biologically meaningful set of structures are still not widely available. In the present study, we developed an automated process to segment brain nuclei and quantify tissue susceptibility in these regions based on a susceptibility multi-atlas library, consisting of 10 atlases with T1-weighted images, gradient echo (GRE) magnitude images and QSM images of brains with different anatomic patterns. For each atlas in this library, 10 regions of interest in iron-rich deep gray matter structures that are better defined by QSM contrast were manually labeled, including caudate, putamen, globus pallidus internal/external, thalamus, pulvinar, subthalamic nucleus, substantia nigra, red nucleus and dentate nucleus in both left and right hemispheres. We then tested different pipelines using different combinations of contrast *

http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/246/1/229/DC1.