Segmentation of thalamic nuclei based on tensorial morphological gradient of diffusion tensor fields

Authors:
Leticia Rittner;Roberto A. Lotufo;Jennifer Campbell;G. Bruce Pike
Affiliations:
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil;McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montréal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada;McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montréal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Venue:
ISBI'10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE international conference on Biomedical imaging: from nano to Macro
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Although thalamic nuclei are not directly visible on conventional anatomical magnetic resonance images (MRI), it is possible to observe differences between the nuclei using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), because of their distinct fiber orientation. This work presents a method to segment the various nuclei of human thalamus using diffusion MRI. Our approach is to use the watershed transform and other concepts from mathematical morphology to segment the nuclei. However, to segment structures using the tensor data produced with DTI (as opposed to scalar images) the concept of a tensorial morphological gradient (TMG) needs to be introduced. Based on the TMG, segmentation of the nuclei of the thalamus was successful using the watershed transform. Our segmentation is consistent with a histological atlas. Since the proposed method, as opposed to the majority ofthe DTI-based segmentation methods, does not require manual seed and/or surface placement, its results are highly repeatable.