A New Approach to D Sulcal Ribbon Finding from MR Images

Sulcal medial surfaces are D thin convoluted ribbons em bedded in cortical sulci and they provide distinctive anatomical features of the brain Here we propose a new approach to automatic intrasulcal ribbon nding following our work on cortex segmentation with coupled surfaces via level set methods where the outer cortical surface is em bedded as the zero level set of a high dimensional distance function Through the utilization of this distance function we are able to formu late the sulcal ribbon nding problem as one of surface deformation thus avoiding possible control problems in other work using sliding contour models Using dynamic programming and deformable surface models our method requires little manual intervention and results parameter ized sulcal ribbon surfaces in nearly real time Though a natural follow up to our earlier segmentation work we describe how it can be applied with general segmentation methods We also present quantitative results on MR brain images