Model-based automatic detection of the anterior and posterior commissures on MRI scans

The projections of the anterior and posterior commissures (AC/PC) on the mid-sagittal plane of the human brain are important landmarks in neuroimaging. They can be used, for example, during MRI scanning for acquiring the imaging sections in a standard orientation. In post-acquisition image processing, these landmarks serve to establish an anatomically-based frame of reference within the brain that can be extremely useful in designing automated image analysis algorithms such as image segmentation and registration methods. This paper presents a fully automatic model-based algorithm for AC/PC detection on MRI scans. The algorithm utilizes information from a number of model images on which the locations of the AC/PC and a reference point (the vertex of the superior pontine sulcus) are known. This information is then used to locate the landmarks on test scans by template matching. The algorithm is designed to be fast, robust, and accurate. The method is flexible in that it can be trained to work on different image contrasts, optimized for different populations, or scanning modes. To assess the effectiveness of this technique, we compared automatically and manually detected landmark locations on 84 T(1)-weighted and 42 T(2)-weighted test scans. Overall, the average Euclidean distance between automatically and manually detected landmarks was 1.1 mm. A software implementation of the algorithm is freely available online at www.nitrc.org/projects/art.