InSANE: Insight Surface Analysis and Normalization Environment

description

The goal of this project is to contribute a surface-based labeling and analysis application to ITK which will allow users to visualize surface geometry, label anatomical/functional areas and flatten the area of interest to a normalized space.

InSANE is an interactive environment based on ITK and related open source tools that allow the user to perform an array of surface based analyses. The application will typically support the following workflow:

• Load and visualize surface geometry.
• Label anatomical or functional areas with a live-wire style interface.
• Flatten the surface or the labeled part thereof to a normalized space such as a unit disk or a unit sphere.
• Visualize functional activation or any other surface based function on the normalized space and/or test for statistically significant group differences over the flattened domain. This type of analysis is often used in looking at gray matter thickness differences.

Availability of this tool should encourage researchers in functional and neuroanatomical imaging to use ITK and, at the same time, will provide users outside the neuroimaging community access and exposure to surface-based analysis tools. The interactive landmarking methods are expected to also be valuable for registration and segmentation algorithm evaluation and in expert-guided image registration.

images

Sample Flattening.

This illustrates a gray matter segmentation, visualization of curvature and flattening steps, as well as landmarks in the volumetric and flattened domain.

The mean curvature of a white matter segmentation (left), the extraction of the frontal lobe (center) and flattening to a unit disk (right).

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