Shape analysis of human brain interhemispheric fissure bending in MRI

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to analyze Yakovlevian torque by quantifying the bending of human brain interhemispheric fissure in three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging. It extracts the longitudinal medial surface between the cerebral hemispheres, which are segmented with an accurate and completely automatic technique, as the shape representation of the interhemispheric fissure. The extracted medial surface is modeled with a polynomial surface through least-square fitting. Finally, curvature features, e.g. principal, Gaussian and mean curvatures, are computed at each point of the fitted medial surface to describe the local bending of the interhemispheric fissure. This method was applied to clinical images of healthy controls (12 males, 7 females) and never-medicated schizophrenic subjects (11 males, 7 females). The hypothesis of the normal interhemispheric fissure bending (rightward in the occipital region) was quantitatively demonstrated. Moreover, we found significant differences (p < 0.05) between the male schizophrenics and healthy controls with respect to the interhemispheric fissure bending in the frontal and occipital regions. These results show that our method is applicable for studying abnormal Yakovlevian torque related to mental diseases. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.