Quantitative evaluation of three cortical surface flattening methods

During the past decade, several computational approaches have been proposed for the task of mapping highly convoluted surfaces of the human brain to simpler geometric objects such as a sphere or a topological disc. We report the results of a quantitative comparison of FreeSurfer, CirclePack, and LSCM with respect to measurements of geometric distortion and computational speed. Our results indicate that FreeSurfer performs best with respect to a global measurement of metric distortion, whereas LSCM performs best with respect to angular distortion and best in all but one case with a local measurement of metric distortion. FreeSurfer provides more homogeneous distribution of metric distortion across the whole cortex than CirclePack and LSCM. LSCM is the most computationally efficient algorithm for generating spherical maps, while CirclePack is extremely fast for generating planar maps from patches.