Interactive specification of regions of interest on brain surfaces

We describe Surface Editor-a tool for interactive specification of regions of interest (ROIs) on brain surfaces. The tool allows users to define subsurfaces by tracing around areas within a triangle-mesh brain surface. The input to the program is a triangle-mesh representation of a brain volume and a set of user-defined input points on the mesh. The program connects each pair of successive input points with a polyline that results from the intersection of the mesh with a plane that is approximately normal to the mesh. The polyline comprises coplanar line segments. The boundary of an ROI is a connected set of polylines that intersects triangle edges to form a continuous path. To validate Surface Editor we demonstrated that the program could be used to interactively delineate gyri on brain surfaces, and we showed that paths that the program generated were comparable to paths that a user generated and to shortest paths.