A Novel Automatic Algorithm for Selecting a Target Brain using a Simple Structure Analysis in Talairach Coordinate System

It is one of the most important issues to determine a target brain image that gives a common coordinate system for a constructing population-based brain atlas. The purpose of this study is to provide a simple and reliable procedure that determines the target brain image among the group based on the inherent structural information of three-dimensional magnetic resonance (MR) images. It uses only 11 lines defined automatically as a feature vector representing structural variations based on the Talairach coordinate system. Average characteristic vector of the group and the difference vectors of each one from the average vector were obtained. Finally, the individual data that had the minimum difference vector was determined as the target. We determined the target brain image by both our algorithm and conventional visual inspection for 20 healthy young volunteers. Eighteen fiducial points were marked independently for each data to evaluate the similarity. Target brain image obtained by our algorithm showed the best result, and the visual inspection determined the second one. We concluded that our method could be used to determine an appropriate target brain image in constructing brain atlases such as disease-specific ones.