Y.Liu, R.Collins and W.E.Rothfus,
"Robust Midsagittal Plane Extraction from Normal and Pathological 3D
Neuroradiology Images,"
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Vol. 20(3), March, 2001, pp.175-192.
Abstract
This paper focuses on extracting the ideal midsagittal plane (iMSP) from
three-dimensional normal and pathological neuroimages. The main
challenges in this work are the structural asymmetry that may exist in
pathological brains, and the anisotropic, unevenly sampled image data
that is common in clinical practice. We present an edge-based,
cross-correlation approach that decomposes the plane fitting problem into
discovery of two-dimensional symmetry axes on each slice, followed by a
robust estimation of plane parameters. The algorithm's tolerance to brain
asymmetries, input image offsets and image noise is quantitatively evaluated.
We find that the algorithm can extract the iMSP from input 3D images with
1) large asymmetrical lesions; 2) arbitrary initial rotation offsets; 3)
low signal-to-noise ratio or high bias field. The iMSP algorithm is
compared with an approach based on maximization of mutual information
registration, and is found to exhibit superior performance under adverse
conditions. Finally, no statistically significant difference is found
between the midsagitaal plane computed by the iMSP algorithm and that
estimated by two trained neuroradiologists.
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