Automatic landmarking of magnetic resonance brain images

Landmarking MR images is crucial in registering brain structures from different images. It consists in locating the voxel in the image that corresponds to a well-defined point in the anatomy, called the landmark. Example of landmarks are the apex of the head (HoH) of the Hippocampus, the tail and the tip of the splenium of the corpus collosum (SCC). Hand landmarking is tedious and time-consuming. It requires an adequate training. Experimental studies show that the results are dependent on the landmarker and drifting with time. We propose a generic algorithm performing semi-automated detection of landmarks. The first part consists in learning from a training set of landmarked images the parameters of a probabilistic model, using the EM algorithm. The second part inputs the estimated parameters and a new image, and outputs a voxel as a predicted location for the landmark. The algorithm is demonstrated on the HoH and the SCC. In contrast with competing approaches, the algorithm is generic: it can be used to detect any landmark as soon as a collection of hand-landmarked images is provided for training.