The Construction And Application Of A Three-Dimensional Digital Atlas Of Human Brain

Brain is the most vital and elaborate organ of human beings. Since the last decade of the 20th century, more and more attentions have been paid to the research on brain, including the study and application of digital brain atlases.Earlier printed brain atlases are mainly some sets of 2D pictures, such as Talairach-Tournoux, Schaltenbrand-Wahren etc, which have made great influence on learning and teaching of neuroanatomy, as well as on some other applications. However, there are still some deficiencies in these printed brain atlases, for example, they are always unchangeable after the creation, and doctors can hardly derive a 3D impression of inner structures of brain from 2D images. Therefore, compared with traditional printed atlases, digitized brain atlases are computerized and can be stored in digital format, so they can be updated easily. In addition, modern 3D reconstruction technology can easily visualize digital brain atlases in 3D space with high quality.In this paper, we introduce a general method to construct a digitized brain atlas. There are five main steps. (1) Collect the dataset and do some pretreatments. (2) Extract the region of interest. (3) Labeling. (4) Surface reconstruction. (5) Meshes smoothing.First, we use the MR image provided by Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. Then, we employ a multistage hybrid segmentation algorithm to segment the brain and extract the ROIs, after that, we need to do some adjustments. Next, we label every ROI with its anatomical name, and combine the label with its location information. After labeling, we use Marching Cubes algorithm to reconstruct the surface of every ROI, and we obtain a database of 3D models. Because of the medical images are always created via scanning slice by slice, the 3D models, created in previous step, appear obvious ladder effect. So, we need to smooth the meshes to impair the ladder effect.Digitized brain atlases are powerful tools in neuroanatomical surgery planning and education of neuroanatomy. Another important usage of digitized brain atlas is to conduct the model based segmentation. So, in the end of this paper, we take out some experiments to indicate that our brain atlas can easily be used for model based segmentation.So far, our atlas has been mostly constructed, but there are still some deficiencies, so we have to improve our study in the future.