Section: Application Domains

Co-segmentation and Co-registration of Subcortical Brain Structures

New algorithms to perform co-segmentation and co-registration of subcortical brain structures on MRI images are investigated in collaboration with Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center from Montreal. Brain subcortical structures are involved in different neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, Alzheimers disease, attention deficit, and subtypes of epilepsy. Segmenting these parts of the brain enables a physician to extract indicators, facilitating their quantitative analysis and characterization. We are investigating how estimated maps of semantic labels (obtained using machine learning techniques) can be used as a surrogate for unlabelled data. We are exploring how to combine them with multi-population deformable registration to improve both alignment and segmentation of these challenging brain structures.