GeMBASE: A Geometric Mediator for Brain Analysis with Surface Ensembles

Brain researchers, neurologists and neurosurgeons acquire 3D brain images from normal and diseased subjects with the idea to study the properties of brains, make comparisons and to measure changes caused by factors like age and disease. Over the last few years, significant efforts have been made [1, 2, 3, 4] to create software to extract the cerebral cortex (or other structures) from the brain, and reconstruct it as a 3D digital object for further analysis. While they all use different techniques to derive the digital representation of the structure, they all represent it as some form of a surface mesh object, often with a thickness at every node of the mesh. In this demonstration, we present GeMBASE, a prototype system that stores brain structures in a database, and allows researchers to perform their tasks in a database environment. The system borrows ideas from information mediation to answer complex queries on surface meshes.