CBA--an atlas-based software tool used to facilitate the interpretation of neuroimaging data

CBA, a software tool used to improve quantification and evaluation of neuroimaging data has been developed. It uses a detailed 3-dimensional brain atlas that can be adapted to fit the brain of an individual patient represented by a series of displayed images. Anatomical information from the atlas can then be introduced into the images. If the patient has been imaged in different modalities, adaptation of the atlas to the different images will provide the transformation that brings the images into registration. CBA can thus be used as a tool for fusing multimodality information from the same patient. Furthermore, by applying the inverse atlas transformation, images from a patient can be transformed to conform to the anatomy of the atlas brain. This anatomical standardization, where the atlas brain itself serves as the anatomy standard, brings data from different individuals into a compatible form providing possibilities to perform individual-group and group-by-group comparisons between patients and normal controls.