Adaptive Reproducing Kernel Particle Method for
Extraction of the Cortical Surface
Source: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
2006 Jun;25(6):755-767.
Author: Xu M, Thompson PM, Toga AW. PubMed ID: 16768240
Abstract:
We propose a novel adaptive approach based on the
Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM) to extract the cortical
surfaces of the brain from three–dimensional (3-D) magnetic
resonance images (MRIs). To formulate the discrete equations
of the deformable model, a flexible particle shape function is
employed in the Galerkin approximation of the weak form of the
equilibrium equations. The proposed support generation method
ensures that support of all particles cover the entire computational
domains. The deformable model is adaptively adjusted by dilating
the shape function and by inserting or merging particles in the
high curvature regions or regions stopped by the target boundary.
The shape function of the particle with a dilation parameter
is adaptively constructed in response to particle insertion or
merging. The proposed method offers flexibility in representing
highly convolved structures and in refining the deformable models.
Self-intersection of the surface, during evolution, is prevented by
tracing backward along gradient descent direction from the crest
interface of the distance field, which is computed by fast marching.
These operations involve a significant computational cost. The
initial model for the deformable surface is simple and requires no
prior knowledge of the segmented structure. No specific template
is required, e.g., an average cortical surface obtained from many
subjects. The extracted cortical surface efficiently localizes the
depths of the cerebral sulci, unlike some other active surface
approaches that penalize regions of high curvature. Comparisons
with manually segmented landmark data are provided to
demonstrate the high accuracy of the proposed method. We also
compare the proposed method to the finite element method, and
to a commonly used cortical surface extraction approach, the
CRUISE method. We also show that the independence of the
shape functions of the RKPM from the underlying mesh enhances
the convergence speed of the deformable model.