Surface Agnostic Metrics for Cortical Volume Segmentation and Regression
This provides a faster, more robust alternative for clinical analysis of cortical variation in cognitive disorders, though it is incremental as it adapts existing deep learning methods to a known bottleneck.
The authors tackled the problem of slow and sensitive cortical surface analysis by training a novel deep learning architecture to predict cortical thickness and curvature directly from T2 MRI images, achieving results that suggest viability across brain development stages and pathologies.
The cerebral cortex performs higher-order brain functions and is thus implicated in a range of cognitive disorders. Current analysis of cortical variation is typically performed by fitting surface mesh models to inner and outer cortical boundaries and investigating metrics such as surface area and cortical curvature or thickness. These, however, take a long time to run, and are sensitive to motion and image and surface resolution, which can prohibit their use in clinical settings. In this paper, we instead propose a machine learning solution, training a novel architecture to predict cortical thickness and curvature metrics from T2 MRI images, while additionally returning metrics of prediction uncertainty. Our proposed model is tested on a clinical cohort (Down Syndrome) for which surface-based modelling often fails. Results suggest that deep convolutional neural networks are a viable option to predict cortical metrics across a range of brain development stages and pathologies.